Bloomberg Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg has encouraged women to “lean in” to their careers, but even women who make it to the top don’t make as much as men, new data shows. 
 
 The average female worker makes the most money she’ll ever earn a full 25 years before she’s likely to retire. 
 
 Between the ages of 20 and 40, the median pay for women ticks up slightly every five years until topping off at $49,000, where it stays through age 65, according to data released by salary comparison site PayScale on Thursday. But men see their salaries grow all the way until they’re at least 50, when their median earnings hit $75,000. 
 
 But the reason for the divergence at middle age isn’t simply the “obvious explanation” -- that women take time off from work to have kids and return lacking the necessary skills to move up -- as Heidi Hartmann, the president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, puts it. Instead there are other factors at play that result in women reaching their peak earnings potential well before men, Hartmann says. 
 
 One major explanation for the trend: Female-dominated jobs, like teaching and nursing, tend to be less specialized, so they don’t demand the string of promotions and pay premiums that firms typically use to keep their best performers around, says Hartmann. Though professions that fit this bill, such as law and engineering, have certainly become more open to women than in previous years, they’re still not as gender-integrated as they could be, Hartmann says. 
 
 “It’s not really a wage gap, it’s a jobs gap,” says Katie Bardaro, PayScale’s lead economist. 
 
 Read: Gender wage gap narrows by just 1 cent 
 
 But even when men and women choose the same types of jobs, women get paid less, PayScale found. What’s more, the gap in pay only grows as men and women climb the corporate ladder. Women executives get paid 6.1% less on average than their male counterparts, PayScale found. Regular rank-and-file workers have a pay gap of just 2.2%. 
 
 “There’s discrimination,” Hartmann says. “I think that a lot of pay is still based on the head of household model.” In other words, men get paid more because the expectation is that they’re earning money for their families, whereas women’s salaries are thought of as simply a “nice to have” for a family, she says. “There’s a heck of a lot of inefficiency the way supervisors set wages,” Hartmann says. 
 
 That dynamic may in part explain why women appear to be more shy about voicing their commitment to their families. PayScale found that 52% of men say they prioritize their home life over work at least one or two times a month, versus 46% of women. “Women -- even if they do it -- don’t want to say that they do it, because they’re worried they’re being judged for it,” Bardero said. 
 
 More from MarketWatch ||||| Earlier this month, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that the gender wage gap narrowed to the lowest level on record last year. Women working full-time, year-round jobs earned 78.6% of what similar men did in 2014, up from 78.3% in 2013. While that’s the smallest gap on record since 1960, the change is not statistically significant, so there’s little to celebrate. The gap between men’s and women’s earnings has remained, in inflation-adjusted dollars, at about $11,000 to $12,000 since 2001. 
 
 And according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, at the current rate, women will not see equal pay until 2059 — one year longer than IWPR’s previous projection. Certainly that’s much too long a wait. Ensuring that women receive equal pay is not as easy as just paying women more for their work (though that would be a good start!). Narrowing the gender wage gap will involve focusing on America’s lowest-paid workers, the majority of which are women. It also requires reforming paid leave policies to ensure that workers who provide family care do not see their careers suffer. 
 
 On the business side, employers can provide paid family leave, which can pay for itself in many work places by reducing turnover costs through encouraging women to stay in the workforce after having a child. It’s time the United States caught up with other wealthy nations that do a better job by far at addressing the family needs of workers by offering subsidized child care, paid sick days, and paid family leave. These measures increase women’s wages in the long run and help equalize caregiving between women and men and lead women to invest more in their careers. 
 
 Businesses must also mitigate occupational segregation—four in ten men and women work in occupations dominated by their own gender, and ‘men’s occupations,’ for example, computer software engineers and construction managers, typically pay more than ‘women’s occupations,’ for examples, registered nurses and social workers, even when the skill levels required are similar. Hiring more women in nontraditional jobs and furthermore supporting their persistence by providing mentoring and other aids are crucial employer actions for raising women’s pay. And because corporate policy is often determined at the top, ensuring that more women serve on corporate boards and are in positions of leadership can lead to sustained advancement for women. 
 
 Policymakers, too, must take achieving equal pay seriously. For far too long, they have largely paid lip service to the goal of gender parity in earnings, but there are concrete actions that can be taken to narrow, and eventually eliminate, the gender wage gap. First, policymakers can strengthen enforcement of current equal employment opportunity laws—specifically, ensuring non-retaliation against workers who share pay information, increasing protections and accommodations for pregnant workers, and requiring employers to pay comparable men’s and women’s jobs equally (as is done in Canada and many other countries) — so that women are treated fairly both in terms of access to high quality jobs and to pay parity with men in all jobs. 
 
 In recent years, America’s poorest workers have not gotten much, if any, help from federal government wage policies. At $7.25 an hour, the U.S. minimum wage is below where it was in the 1960s. Women hold the majority of America’s lowest-paid jobs, as well as jobs in which tips are common, they would benefit most if Congress eliminated the tipped minimum wage, which has been stuck at $2.13 per hour since 1991, at the same time it raises the overall minimum to a 21st century level. Through executive orders, the Obama Administration has required federal contractors to pay a higher minimum wage than the current level and provide paid sick days. But legislative action on improving jobs for those at the bottom of the labor market will ensure that these policies reach all workers. In addition, the Department of Labor will soon raise the overtime salary threshold below which it is assumed that salaried workers deserve premium pay at time and a half for their hours worked beyond 40 per week. 
 
 And finally, policies that address the power of women—such as, ensuring collective bargaining for all workers, encouraging women to take leadership positions in labor unions, and electing more women to political office (at the current rate, women will not have an equal share of seats in Congress until 2117)—can ensure that women are always at the table when policies that affect all of us are decided. 
 
 For families, the gender wage gap can make the difference between living below or above the poverty line, between having access to high-quality child care, schools, and colleges, or only being able to afford poorer quality alternatives or no pre-kindergarten or post-secondary education at all. 
 
 For the economy overall, unequal pay is stunting economic growth. IWPR estimates that nearly 60 percent of women would gain pay if they were paid the same as men with similar qualifications and hours of work. Added across the U.S. economy, theses gains amount to 2.9 percent of GDP, a growth rate equivalent to adding another state the size of Virginia. Each woman, including those who would gain nothing, would earn $6,251 more annually on average, reducing poverty by half for all families with a working woman and working women who live alone. 
 
 No strategy other than achieving equal pay for women can boost wages for millions of working Americans, cut poverty in half, and grow the U.S. economy by a brisk three percent of GDP. 
 
 Heidi Hartmann, Ph.D., is an economist, MacArthur Fellow, and president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a nonprofit research institute in Washington, DC. ||||| Today is Equal Pay Day. That’s the approximate day in the year where the average woman working full time gets to catch up to the salary of her male counterpart (or about 79¢ for every one of his dollars). 
 
 Although the earnings gap has closed substantially since the 1960s, a new report from U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee (JEC) indicates that at the current rate of change, the gender pay gap will not close until 2059. Until it does, women on average earn about $10,800 less per year than men, based on median annual earnings. This adds up to nearly a half million dollars over a career. 
 
 “Women make up only 26% of highly paid chief executives but 71% of low-paid cashiers.” 
 
 But it’s not fair, nor is it accurate, to hang on to that 79¢ as the ultimate indicator of the wage gap. It’s much more complex than that. 
 
 That’s because averages don’t always show us the full picture. For example, the numbers change based on race and ethnicity. The National Partnership for Women and Families found that African-American and Hispanic women have an even more significant gender-based wage gap, not just when measured against men, but also compared to white women. 
 
 Age is also a factor. As women get older, they make even less than men of the same age, according to the JEC report. 
 
 Andrew Chamberlain, Glassdoor’s chief economist, points out that in the company’s most recent study, the sorting of men and women into jobs and industries that pay differently throughout the economy explains 54% of the overall or “unadjusted” pay gap—by far the largest factor. “Census figures show women make up only 26% of highly paid chief executives but 71% of low-paid cashiers,” he says. “By contrast, differences in education and experience between men and women explain only a small part of the pay gap.” 
 
 Adjusting for those factors changes the picture pretty radically. Glassdoor’s data analysis was taken from the millions of salaries shared anonymously online by employees and former employees in its platform. Chamberlain says that the initial analysis revealed that unadjusted data accounted for a 24.1% gap in earnings between men and women or 75.9 cents for every dollar earned by a man. But, Chamberlain observes, “It persists even after comparing men and women with the same job title, at the same company, and with similar education and experience.” Those adjustments still show a 5.4% pay advantage for men and women earning 94.6¢.
– Women's earnings continue to rise slightly every five years between the ages of 20 and 40, at which point the median salary peaks at $49,000. From there until retirement 25 years later women's earnings remain flat, while men's salaries continue to grow until into their 50s, at which point the median salary is around $75,000, reports Marketwatch. This discrepancy persists even when men and women hold the same jobs, according to numbers released by salary comparison site PayScale, with a regular pay gap of 2.2% for most workers and an even higher one, 6.1%, for executives. ThinkProgress notes that the study shows the wage gap persists in every industry, at every educational level, and at every job level. "There’s discrimination," says Heidi Hartmann, the president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. "A lot of pay is still based on the head of household model, where expectations that men earn to support their families while women earn money that's just "nice to have" persist, she says. "There’s a heck of a lot of inefficiency the way supervisors set wages." And while more women do tend to take some time off of work to start a family, this doesn't explain the stalled increase in earnings a full decade before men see the same plateau. Hartmann says that at least some of the difference may be more in the kinds of jobs women are currently taking versus men, and Payscale's lead economist backs that up. "It’s not really a wage gap, it’s a jobs gap," Katie Bardaro says. Fast Company has a more detailed breakdown, ranging from a gender wage gap of 9.4% in farming, fishing, and forestry, to 1.4% in personal care and service. (See why Jennifer Lawrence thinks she's paid less than her male co-stars.)