The Women’s Fund of Greater Milwaukee recently released its Women's Well-Being Index report. The report provides both state-wide and Milwaukee-area data on women’s safety, health, economic security, education and more.
The Women’s Fund conducted the study with the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies (CCNS), using publicly available statewide data.
Lake Effect’s Audrey Nowakowski spoke with CCNS Executive Director Mary Beth Collins to help break down the data and share how it could be used to promote greater gender equity in Wisconsin.
1. Women in Wisconsin experience relatively high levels of education and workforce participation.
The report found that 36% of Wisconsin women hold bachelor's degrees, compared to 30% of men. Only 6% of Wisconsin women have less than a college degree, compared to 8% of men.
Wisconsin women also see relatively high levels of workforce participation.
"Excluding widowed women (who are often retirees), 66% of Wisconsin women are in the labor force," the report says. "Women who have never been married participate at the highest rates with 72% participation, while women who are married or divorced participate at somewhat lower rates (64% and 63%, respectively)."
2. Rates of Wisconsin women in government and corporate leadership are increasing.
The report found that women hold 31% of seats in the state legislature, 29% of city council seats, and 24% of county board seats in Wisconsin. In corporate leadership, 31% of Wisconsin's top 50 public companies had women directors in 2024 — although these position skew heavily towards white women.
"[This] of course is a huge improvement if you were to dial back 50 or 100 years, but it's still very much under pro rata population comparison which would put us at closer to 50%," notes Collins. "So I think that the story is that we have been moving in a direction of greater participation and access to participate in the ways that women want to participate in society — and we have not alleviated some of the challenges that face women in particular ways."
3. Despite all this, the gender pay gap is widening in Wisconsin.
Nationwide data show U.S. women earning 82 cents for every dollar that man earn. In Wisconsin, that gap is even worse. In 2022, women earned 80.4 cents for every dollar earned by men.
"This is the widest gender pay gap that Wisconsin has seen since 2016 and shows a stark widening since 2021, when women earned 89.4 cents per dollar men earned," the report says.
This gap persists, despite higher levels of education among women.
"A Wisconsin man without a high school diploma outearns a Wisconsin woman with an associate's degree by approximately $2,000 a year," the report says.
Collins points to two factors that exacerbate this gap. One factor is that women often serve as default caregivers for extended and nuclear family needs. Another is that a higher percentage of women work in lower-paying "helping professions" — including early childhood care, service industry jobs and teaching.
"We see more parity when women are in jobs like the legal profession or media, where there's not such an association with the field as being, 'women's work,' which is a theme that people talk about in some of these other professions," Collins says.
4. Although Wisconsin's maternal mortality rate is lower than the national average, maternal and infant mortality rates for people of color are disproportionately high.
At the national level, the U.S. sees 22.4 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births — the highest rates of any country in the global north, the report shows. In 2023, Wisconsin saw 10.8 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births — significantly lower the national average and averages from Minnesota, Illinois and Iowa. However, these rates differ significantly by race.
"Black, Hispanic and Asian women, non-white women, Indigenous women represent 25% of the births in Wisconsin but 50% of the maternal mortality rates," says Collins.
Despite progress in certain areas, she notes the report's findings should be cause for reflection for public, private and civil society institutions in Wisconsin.
"Any representative of any organization — whether it be a business or a civil society organization or a local government — could really look at this data and ask themselves the question: 'Where in this do we see ourselves, and ... [are we] contributing to those disparities or contributing to the more positive trends?" she says.
"The fact [is] that women are holding together so many of these roles across family spaces, professional spaces, public spaces, community spaces and if we don't support women in that, there's a lot of pillars of our communities that are not going to be there in the way that we need them to be there. And if anything, we need to fortify and compensate those things even more and recognize them even more," adds Collins.
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