she/her
Bela Salas-Betsch is a research associate with the Women’s Initiative working on topics related to women’s economic security. Prior to joining American Progress, she interned on Capitol Hill for Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), supporting work on health and human services programs and worked as a project assistant for the city of Philadelphia’s Office of Transportation, Infrastructure, and Sustainability. Salas-Betsch graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Arts in political science and a minor in fine arts and design. While in undergrad, she assisted on a research project looking at how state-level policies shaped women’s economic status across place and time in the United States. She is proudly from Philadelphia and loves to thrift shop, draw, and bike in her free time.
While the salary range transparency movement is growing at the state level, more action is needed to introduce, pass, and enact permanent laws.
Thanks to the strong economic recovery, women’s labor force participation is reaching new highs, with prime-age women’s employment back to pre-pandemic levels—although long-standing pay gaps and occupational segregation remain challenges.
Women and their families should find some current financial pressures—fueled partly by the gender wage gap—alleviated by recent policy wins, particularly if policymakers prioritize implementing new pathways to good jobs for women in the years ahead.
State abortion bans will negatively affect women and families’ economic security as well as state and local economies.
Counting part-time and part-year workers in wage gap calculations is essential to painting the full picture of the gender wage gap.
