Equality and fair pay for women remains a long-sought goal, but new data says the effort isn’t really working.

BY KIT EATON @KITEATON

Illustration: Inc; Photo: Getty Images

New data on recent graduates’ salaries reinforces the idea that traditional college degrees may be losing some of their value, weakening the argument at the heart of all those “go earn a degree, it’ll set you up for life!” pep talks from your parents. The data is also bad news for women in the workplace: it says that if you’ve gone to the trouble of studying hard for four years at college, your pay may be only 5 percent higher than the equivalent pay of women who don’t have a degree. 

Reporting on the data, news site Phys.org notes that the new analysis is a dramatic challenge to conventional wisdom about the benefit of degrees for early career pay levels, and it suggests that many earlier pay estimates for female graduates were overestimated—worse, it may be that what looks like higher pay for female graduates may be tied to working longer hours, rather than actual higher base salaries.

The raw data, gathered from over 2,000 Millennial workers, shows that........

© Inc.com