The Gender Pay Gap, Starring Meryl Streep’s Most Iconic Roles

There’s a persistent pay gap that exists between working men and women in our country, and sadly, it doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon. Men earn, on average, 20% more than women in the same profession, which means that women would have to work, on average, an extra 66 business days each year in order to earn what a man in her position made in 1 year. That’s the concept behind Equal Pay Day: the date on which working women’s wages catch up to what men in their profession earned the year prior. This year it falls on April 4th.

Of course, some professions have a bigger pay gap than others. To best illustrate this concept, the data scientists at Care.com’s Think Tank enlisted a little help from everyone’s favorite living Hollywood legend, Meryl Streep.

Using 9 of Streep’s iconic roles — ranging from chef, to lawyer, to editor-in-chief — the data scientists at Care.com’s Think Tank calculated each character’s projected salary, and found how much less Meryl’s character would be paid than a man in the same position. They then determined the ‘Equal Pay Day’ for each character’s profession—i.e., how far into the next year she’d need to work to earn the same as a man in her field.

Click here for the complete study, which investigates the gender pay gap across an additional 516 professions, complete with an animated video and infographic.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170404005604/en/