Women make 23% more in a unionized trade than non-union counterparts. In a union, you cannot get paid less because you’re a woman, and that happens frequently in non-union work, so the wage gap is less.
https://people.com/woman-in-the-trades-says-women-can-make-over-usd40-an-hour-exclusive-12137269
Sep 29, 2026, 8:18 AM@amydiehl Do you know how this translates outside of the trades? Since gender pay-gap reporting became mandatory, the pay difference in computing-related fields has mostly become a promotional-velocity difference: Women are paid at the same rate as men within a level, but it takes them longer to move between levels (or leave because they’re fed up of less-competent men being promoted past them). The net effect is the same but now companies can claim to have a gender pay gap of under 1%. I presume unions would have access to company-wide level and time-in-level information and so would be better placed to call bullshit on this kind of behaviour.
@amydiehl Not just pay equality, but pay parity for jobs of similar skill levels. In the UK, unions have managed to push this so that supermarket till-operators (predominantly female) get the same rate as their equivalent workers in the warehouse (predominantly male). Still, you are always fighting Big Capitalists, so the battle carries on. Of course, this is only one of many reasons why you should join a union.