Equal pay perceptions among employed Americans diverge sharply by gender, according to a new AP-NORC poll released ahead of Equal Pay Day, the annual marker that symbolizes how far into the year women must work to match men’s earnings from the prior year.
In the survey, most working women said they are disadvantaged when it comes to earning competitive wages, while many men held different views about which gender has the advantage. The AP-NORC poll also found that a sizable share of women report personal experience with wage discrimination tied to their gender, while men are far less likely to report similar experiences.
Equal pay emerged as a major concern for working women in the poll, and it highlighted a gap in how women and men see gender equity. Among employed women, the poll found that about 6 in 10 say men have more opportunities to earn competitive wages, while about one-third said neither gender has an advantage.
The same survey found that among employed men, views split more evenly. About 4 in 10 said men have an advantage in earning competitive wages, about half said men and women have about the same opportunities, and about 1 in 10 said women have more opportunities. Just about 1 in 10 men said they personally experienced wage discrimination because of their gender.
The poll also asked respondents about personal discrimination. About 3 in 10 employed women said they have personally experienced wage discrimination because of their gender, while fewer women—about 2 in 10—said they were discriminated against in getting hired because of their gender, a level about similar to men’s share.
In one of the profiles described alongside the survey results, Jessica Thompson, 47, said she saw gender bias during her working life in sales management. Until losing her job in January, Thompson said she earned $65,000 a year as a senior sales manager in Rockford, Illinois, while a male colleague with similar credentials earned $87,000. Thompson said she had to “really prove myself over four years to get the role. And you know, he just came in, just within a few months and got it.”
The AP-NORC poll found that the perceived pay gap also shows up in day-to-day stress. A majority of employed women said the amount of money they get paid is a “major” source of stress in their lives; about 56% of employed women said so, compared with about 4 in 10 employed men who described pay as a major stressor.
Equal Pay Day for this year was Thursday, the poll reporting period’s context, and it fell a day later than in 2025. It also came 16 days earlier than the first Equal Pay Day on April 11, 1996, when women earned about 75 cents for every dollar earned by men.
The poll’s findings come as men’s earnings have been rising faster than women’s, and the gender wage gap has widened for two years in a row, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual report analyzing earnings for full-time workers. Women working full-time on average earned 80.9% of what men earned in 2024, down from 82.7% in 2023, the poll said.
Economists cited in the report said the widening pay gap is partly tied to a post-pandemic return to work for many low-wage women, which lowered average female earnings. The report also pointed to a drop-off in labor force participation among mothers with young children, in part because return-to-office mandates reduced flexibility that emerged during the pandemic.
While the AP-NORC poll found relatively few men describing themselves as disadvantaged, the report also included male workers who said they do see inequality in their fields. Michael Bettger, 51, a mechanic who earns $26 an hour in rural Arkansas, said he believes women struggle more to get ahead in his male-dominated field because of misogyny he has seen. Bettger said other mechanics make jokes about female colleagues being “a distraction,” and he said, “Men do have an advantage and more opportunities for wages. I’ve seen that first hand,” adding that he has “a daughter who wants to be a mechanic, and I’m scared to death of what kind of work she’s going to get.”
The report described political and policy debate over how to address pay disparities, noting that a growing number of mostly Democratic-led states have adopted pay transparency laws that aim to make it easier to uncover unfair practices, including requiring employers to disclose pay ranges in job postings. It also described federal changes under President Donald Trump’s second administration that, according to the report, have limited tools and enforcement mechanisms used to investigate wage discrimination, including by directing federal agencies to stop enforcing “disparate impact liability,” a concept used in civil rights law.
The AP-NORC poll surveyed 1,156 adults from Feb. 5-8 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which the report said is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall was plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.