Miami women get paid the least compared to other big metros

The Miami area is the worst-paying large metro in the nation for women, according to a new study.

Driving the news: Financial website Smartest Dollar published an analysis last week of data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Census Bureau to determine the country's best-paying locations for women.

• Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach ranked last among the 56 large metro areas analyzed.
• Factoring in small- and medium-sized metros, Miami still fares terribly: 345 out of 354.

By the numbers: Here, roughly 47% of women work full-time, and they make a median annual wage of $38,576, compared with the national median of $49,263, per 2021 data adjusted for cost of living.

• Meanwhile, the median wage for men in the area is $45,825. Nationally, it's $60,428.
• The cost of living in Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach is 9.9% higher than the national average.

Zoom out: Florida also ranked last out of all 50 states, with the women's wage median being $41,633.

• The lowest-playing metro in the country is Lawton, Oklahoma, where the median wage for women is $35,686.
• The highest-paying is San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, California, where the median wage is $74,714.

The big picture: Nationally, women have earned roughly 82% as much as men for the past 20 years, Axios' Ivana Saric reports.

• The gaps are more staggering for Black and Hispanic women, who earned 70 cents and 65 cents, respectively, to every dollar earned by a white man in 2022.

• White women earned 83 cents and Asian women earned 93 cents, according to a recently published Pew Research Center analysis.

Between the lines: No single reason accounts for the lack of progress made in the pay gap over the past two decades, Pew's analysis said.

• Greater numbers of women left the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic. Later research showed that this exodus tended to affect women with less education, who were less likely to have jobs that allowed them to work remotely.
• Women also remain "overrepresented in lower-paying occupations relative to their share of the workforce," the analysis noted.