In September, the Utah State University’s Women & Leadership Project released a report entitled “Utah Gender Pay Gap: A 2025 Update.” The snapshot highlights that Utah women working full-time, year-round earn about 27% less than men — the worst gender pay gap in the nation.
The report grants that Utah’s unique culture and demographics play a significant role in women’s workforce participation. At the same time, there is a strong insinuation that Utah’s large pay gap is primarily a policy and structural failure that must be corrected — through changes in workplaces, in public policy, and in cultural expectations.
There are two different types of gender pay gap: adjusted and unadjusted. The adjusted pay gap refers to the gap in pay between men and women in the same or similar roles, when controlling for factors like educational attainment and years of experience. The unadjusted gap simply compares the difference between the average salary of men and women working full-time and year-round — regardless of industry, experience or education.
The good news is that when economists control for factors like hours worked, occupation and experience, the adjusted pay gap in Utah (and the U.S. broadly) shrinks dramatically. In many analyses, women earn between 95 and 99 cents for every dollar men earn in comparable roles. The ideal, of course, would be complete parity. Some have suggested this small remaining gap may come down to differences in temperament, such as a greater willingness by men to negotiate initial salary offers and ask for pay raises, but the research here is mixed.
The unadjusted pay gap, however, is still quite substantial. Nationwide, among all workers ages 16 and older, the gap is about 15%, meaning women overall earn about 85% of what men earn. In Utah, the unadjusted gap is larger still.
According to the new Utah State University report, women in Utah who work full-time and year-round earn about 73 cents for every dollar men earn — a 27% gap, the widest in the country. When all workers are included, Utah women earn just 61 cents for every dollar paid to a man, compared to 75 cents nationally.
These are the numbers that fuel headlines and social media frustration. But like so many things, digging deeper makes all the difference.
More specifically, fixating on surface-level differences in pay, without accounting for meaningful differences in women’s priorities and circumstances, may be part of what’s generating so much acrimony and confusion.
Research increasingly shows that the gender pay gap is really a maternity pay gap. That is, women in the same industry are paid less because women with children deal with pauses in their careers that lead to lower salaries downstream. Even if they are no longer full-time, stay-at-home mothers, their past career pauses affect their seniority.
Economist Claudia Goldin received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics for her work on women’s workforce participation. In “Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women,” Goldin explains that going back to the 18th century, women had the same or higher workforce participation as they do today. This participation in economic activity took a nosedive in the era of industrialization, when paid work shifted away from agriculture, small shops and cottage industries (in other words, work that could be done while tending to children) to factories and later, offices. Rates of workforce participation only began to rebound with the introduction of the contraceptive pill. Childbearing, it seems, has always been part of the equation for women.
It is illustrative to look at the nationwide unadjusted pay gap by age. While the pay gap for all ages is 15%, this narrows to just 5% when looking at adults ages 25-34. While it is possible that younger women workers are better at salary negotiation, it is most likely that in the early years, men and women have equivalent or similar experience and education, as well as less likelihood of bearing children at these younger ages.
Then, as women age into marriage and childbearing, their professional progress slows, with the unadjusted pay gap for the next age cohort (35–44) about 15%, and the age gap peaking in ages 45–64 at 25%. This historical data points strongly to motherhood and caregiving, rather than early-career discrimination, as a major driver of the overall gap.
Simply put, during the years many men are ranking up in career seniority and pay, obtaining promotions and continuing education, women are often making career decisions based on family-friendliness — sometimes taking years off work, reducing their hours part-time or taking flexible but less lucrative positions.
If motherhood is doing so much of the work inside the statistics, the question for a place like Utah is what we should hope those numbers would look like.
We live in a world that often views women as defective men, where we are told that women could be “the same” as men if we only substantially outsourced our natural caregiving roles or develop more masculine sensibilities and behavior patterns.
The Christian gospel, of course, does not tell women they must be the same as men. And Latter-day Saint doctrine points to unique and holy roles for both men and women, both separate and intertwined. “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” teaches that “mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children,” while “fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families.”
Within that shared stewardship, where couples are encouraged to “help one another as equal partners,” couples are also encouraged to prayerfully adapt these principles to their own circumstances.
Latter-day Saints are not only unique in our doctrine of gender and the family, we also have distinctive demographic patterns. Our families are larger than average, with as many as twice the number of children of non-Latter-day Saints.
And in our own analysis of Cooperative Election Survey data, since 2020 Latter-day Saint women under the age of 45 are also nearly twice as likely to be homemakers (29%) as their non-Latter-day Saint peers (15%).
What does this significant discrepancy between mothering and children mean for the pay gap? If core differences in marriage and parenting really do matter that much for diverging earning potential, then perhaps it makes some sense that the pay gap would be larger in a state that prioritizes children so much.
In other words, if the underlying data pattern is the same as in the national data — women who take time off for children earn less — we would expect to see pay differences since Utah’s inputs (the number of children and the time spent at home with children) are significantly higher.
In “Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth,” economist Catherine Pakaluk (herself the mother of eight children — and six more through marriage), details her qualitative research into highly educated American women who choose to have large families (which she defined as five or more children).
While many of her subjects held advanced degrees, including J.D.s, Ph.D.s, and M.D.s, they chose to spend much of their lives pregnant, breastfeeding, and raising little ones. Pakaluk notes that these women, many of them Latter-day Saints, had more children “because they valued children enough to give up those things” they might otherwise have pursued.
Those “costs” show up very clearly on an income chart — but these women understood themselves to be making a deliberate trade, rooted in love of God, love of their children and a particular vision of the good life.
Of course, not all women are called to become mothers. Many women desperately want to become mothers, but that opportunity does not open to them in this life. Those women, along with mothers who choose to work, mothers who must work due to family circumstances, and mothers of adult children, all deserve respect and dignity in the workplace, including fair pay for their experience, education and competency.
It is also a real injustice when women are penalized for pregnancy, sidelined for promotions simply because they are mothers, or paid less than male colleagues for the same work. Latter-day Saints should be among the first to oppose those abuses and to insist that the adjusted pay gap be as close to zero as possible.
Our point here is not to prescribe one path but to suggest that public metrics should leave room for a culture where at-home motherhood is common and valued, and where couples who feel called to prioritize family for a season are not treated as economic failures.
A state with higher marriage rates, younger ages of first marriage, larger families and more mothers at home with young children will almost inevitably show a larger unadjusted gender pay gap — not simply due to misogynistic bias, but rather, due to a pro-child, pro-family bias.
The question is whether we see that gap only as a scandal to be corrected — or also as a sign that many women are acting on deeply held convictions about family and eternity.