Today is Equal Pay Day. If you go back to January 1, 2017 and move forward from there, a woman would need to work until today, April 10, 2018, to make what a man made by December 31, 2017. That is one form of comparison. I generated the following map from Census Bureau data for counties in North Dakota for median wage by sex.
This is a top-level comparison and there are many further controls we might want to employ. We might want to control by education level for example. Perhaps race, industry of occupation, or other demographic and employment variables. For right now the most notable aspect to the graph is possibly the rough regional divide to the county ratios. There are only a couple of counties where it is close to parity, and the counties where the ratio shows the most imbalance are mostly in the western part of the state. The geographic divide and the associated economic divide make this an interesting topic that I will return to as I control for more of the differences.
