The pay gap—or the difference in earnings between men and women—persists throughout the U.S., with full-time working women earning just 81 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2024. A recent business.com analysis of U.S. Census data shows Nevada’s full-time workforce faring better than all but Vermont, but Henderson remains a major outlier. The city had the 15th largest gap in the study, with an average female resident earning $19,645 less than her male counterpart. That’s about 2.5 times greater than Las Vegas’ $8,172 and Nevada’s $7,805, and consistent with a 2024 UNLV Lincy Institute and Brookings Mountain West study ranking it 21st. Let’s take a closer look at these trends in honor of Equal Pay Day on March 26.
IMPLICIT BIASES
Women’s Research Institute of Nevada director and UNLV psychology professor Rachael Robnett says the gap exists for reasons both structural and psychological—from workplace bias and occupational segregation to social stigmas surrounding negotiations.
She rejects criticism attributing the gap to self-selection, or the idea that women tend to choose lower-paying occupations.
“The proof is in the pudding if you actually look at the empirical data,” she says. “When you equate women and men with the same level of education who spend the same number of hours in the workplace, there remains a gap.”
One factor is that women still hold far fewer leadership roles.
“Research indicates that people associate masculine qualities with leadership, so women generally aren’t given the opportunity to take on high-level positions,” Robnett says. “And when they are, they’re often brought in under fraught circumstances.”
Women of color are especially impacted by this “glass cliff,” she adds.
“It’s a phenomenon where women are put in lucrative leadership positions, but only when the company is in a failing state. They often hold these positions relatively briefly,” she says.
The disparities are further compounded at the negotiating table, where women may be less likely to push for higher starting salaries—a disadvantage Robnett says compounds over time. And training women to negotiate more authoritatively may be a double-edged solution.
“A woman and man who are both negotiating aggressively are often perceived differently. People will look at that man and say, ‘wow, what a savvy businessperson,’ whereas the woman might be perceived more negatively for the same behavior,” she says.
WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH HENDERSON?
Robnett offers a few possible explanations for Henderson’s outsize gap, starting with the fact that it hosts a concentration of male-dominated industries like business, technology and medicine.
“To the extent that those are more prevalent economies in Henderson versus Las Vegas, that could be magnifying the gap,” she says. “It’s also possible that parts of the Strip economy are driving some of this, because people earning lucrative salaries there are usually going to live in Henderson.”
The numbers support her theory. According to the UNLV-Brookings study, Henderson men earned a median salary of $70,925—or nearly $19,000 more than their Las Vegas counterparts—suggesting Henderson men earn significantly more.
Robnett notes that the Culinary Union’s presence on the Strip may also positively influence Las Vegas’ pay gap to some degree, even if unions “can only go so far” in mitigating the issue valleywide.
THE RACE BARRIER
“These inequities are more complex if you consider the intersection between gender and race. And Las Vegas, specifically, is really ethnically and racially diverse,” Robnett says.
A 2024 UNR study on Nevada’s Latina labor pool—which identifies the Silver State as one of just six in which Hispanics comprise more than 25% of the workforce—notes that full-time working Hispanic women earned just 57 cents to every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men. This amounts to more than $1.2 million over a 40-year career.
Black and Native American women in the U.S. fared a little better. According to a 2026 report from the American Association of University Women, those groups earned 65 cents and 58 cents, respectively, on every dollar.
“Generally, if a gap is present for white women, it’s going to exist to a much greater degree among women of color,” Robnett says.
CLOSING THE GAP
“If you’re looking at things like women’s presence in the workforce, or women’s personal economic stability, there are some subgroups where we’re actually going backwards,” Robnett says. “You can see that in interesting microcosms, such as the field of computer science, where initially it was much, much more heavily female than it is today.”
She’s been following a relatively recent youth TikTok subculture known as the Tradwife movement, which advocates for a return to traditional female gender roles like being a homemaker.
“It’s great if women want to make that choice if that’s right for them. At the same time, if you see a mass movement where you’re pushing for these norms and ideals, you’re going to see certain indicators of progress going backwards in terms of things like pay equity,” Robnett says.
In other ways, we’ve also taken some steps forward.
“You see positive indicators, such as women increasingly making up a larger share of students in medical or law school. So, there are some different trajectories depending on your group memberships.”
Those educational gains can sometimes be misleading, however.
“Women have an increased share of undergraduate degrees across a number of different majors compared to men,” Robnett says. “But if you compare a woman with a college degree to a man with a high school degree, often the woman needs that degree just to match the salary he can command without one.”
Nevada legislators made some progress in 2021 by passing Senate Bill 293, which requires employers to disclose pay ranges after interviews and prohibits them from using applicants’ salary history against them.
While the gap lingers, most Nevadans remain well ahead of the pack in closing it.
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