78.5
  No, that’s not the day’s high temperature. That’s 78.5 cents  and represents  what is known as the wage gap. In 2010, women in Maine earned 78.5 cents for every dollar a man earned, on average, for fulltime work.  Nationally, the figure is not much better – 78.3% of make earnings. Thirty years earlier, in 1970, the gap was at 58.2% - giving women a gain of 20.3 cents! Will it take another thirty years to close the gap?
There are many factors that contribute to this earnings gap including discrimination in hiring and promotion, occupational choices, opportunities and segregation, women’s role in child-bearing and rearing, among the most prominent.
To bring attention to the wage gap, the US Department of Labor  issued a challenge to developers to create easy to use apps that  use publicly available data and resources and are designed to educate users about the pay gap and provide tools to combat it. The Equal Pay App should improve the accessibility of pay data broken down by gender, race and ethnicity, and provide coaching on early career pay, pay negotiation or career mentorship. Winners of the App challenge will be announced on April 17,  also known as Equal Pay Day, the day  that reflects how far into the current year women must work to match what men earned in the previous year.  For more on this contest go to : http://equalpay.challenge.gov/
 Another effort to shine a spotlight on this issue is a film project with the working title “the pay gap”. You can see a trailer from their kickstarter campaign at this link. 
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kate-bryant/the-pay-gap-working-title
And for more on the issue, see the Maine Economic Growth Council’s 2012 Measures of Growth in Focus report, benchmark # 20, Gender Income Disparity.
http://www.mdf.org/publications/Measures-of-Growth-in-Focus-2012/513/
Let us know what you think!