At the liberal Economic Policy Institute, analysts Elise Gould and Teresa Kroeger report that significant gender gap above:

Right out of college, young men are paid more than their women peers—which is surprising given that these recent graduates have the same amount of education and a limited amount of time to gain differential experience. While young men (age 21–24) with a college degree are paid an average hourly wage of $20.87 early in their careers, their female counterparts are paid an average hourly wage of just $17.88, or $2.99 less than men. This gap of $2.99 per hour is particularly striking as young women have higher rates of bachelor’s degree attainment (20.4 percent) than young men (14.9 percent). This difference would translate to an annual wage gap of more than $6,000 for full-time workers.

While the gender wage gap for young college graduates has closed moderately over the last year, the gap has widened since 2000. In 2000, young female college graduates earned 92 cents for every dollar their male counterparts made. Yet as of February 2017, they earn just 86 cents on the male dollar.

It’s been argued that the gender wage gap is a product of women choosing to reduce their income by interrupting their careers by having children and going into lower-paying fields, choosing degrees in social sciences and education instead of engineering and computer sciences. Even when they get an engineering degree, they are less likely than men to take an engineering job. Women also typically work slightly fewer hours than men. But as reported here five years ago, a study commissioned for the American Association of University Women concluded:

Yet, when we control for each of these factors, women still tended to earn less than their male peers did. Within a number of occupations, women already earned less than men earned just one year out of college. Among teachers, for example, women earned 89 percent of what men earned. In business and management occupations, women earned 86 percent of what men earned; similarly, in sales occupations, women earned just 77 percent of what their male peers earned.

When we compare the earnings of men and women who reported working the same number of hours, men earned more than women did. For example, among those who reported working 40 hours per week, women earned 84 percent of what men earned. Among those who reported working 45 hours per week, women’s earnings were 82 percent of men’s.

Gould and Kroeger note that policies being pushed now that raise wages for all workers “will disproportionately benefit women.” This includes raising the statutory minimum wage, getting rid of the tipped minimum wage, preventing wage theft, and strengthening workers’ collective bargaining rights. As usual, the caveat is that all of those policies require electing the right representatives to get them enacted.