Workplace absence for motherhood or caregiving costs women up to 7 percent on return

It doesn’t just cost women to leave the workplace, whether to raise children or care for an older relative. There’s a financial penalty when they come back, too.

According to the report “The State of the Gender Pay Gap,” from PayScale, Inc., the gender disparity between men and women doesn’t end with the salary women get compared with men when they take the job, or when they’re promoted.

Employees who leave the workforce for a year or more come back to a salary that’s 7.3 percent less than an employee who is currently employed in the same job. (If it’s less than a year, it’s a 4 percent penalty.)

The report points out that, since women leave the workforce more often than men—they’re five times more likely to do so—and their breaks tend to last longer—more likely, in fact, to be longer than a year—they’re disproportionately penalized with lower pay due to career interruptions.

The report also finds that men are 142 percent more likely to win highly compensated senior leadership positions by late career than women.

Men move into more senior positions at significantly higher rates, it says, thus intensifying the opportunity gap problem. “By mid-career,” says the report, “men are 70 percent more likely to be in executive positions than women and by late career, men are 142 percent more likely to be in vice president or C-suite roles which are typically the most highly compensated positions at a company.”

Other findings include the news that while the typical 20- to 29-year-old woman earns 81.8 cents on the dollar compared to her male counterparts, by the time she’s 30–44, that gap has widened to 76.7 cents; once she hits 45, it’s up to 69.1 cents.

And while men and women might both come into the job market at junior levels, women over 30 are more likely than men to stay in individual contributor positions. In fact, 59 percent of women over 45 are in still individual contributor positions, compared with just 43 percent of men.

The study also found that the three states with the greatest controlled pay gap for women are Louisiana (7.4 percent), Alabama (7.1 percent) and West Virginia (6.5 percent).

And the industries with the greatest controlled pay gap for women are oil and gas (7.4 percent), transportation (4.9 percent) and warehousing (also 4.9 percent). Technology and education, on the other hand, have the smallest controlled pay gaps, at 0.8 percent and 0.6 percent, respectively.