This program was part of C-SPAN’s regular Friday “America by the Numbers” series.

But that is not the case, advocates say, pointing to San Francisco, which, in 2006, was the first city to mandate that employers provide sick leave. The ordinance went into effect a year later.

A 2010 survey of 727 employers and 1,194 employees conducted by the Institute for Women's Policy Research found that 6 out of every 7 employers reported no negative effect from the law. Additionally, most workers used only three sick days per year, and a quarter of workers surveyed didn't use any sick days."

The wage gap between women and men isn't going away anytime soon.

A new chart from the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) estimates that, at the current pace, the gap in pay between men and women won't be closed until 2057.

The chart, which looks at full-time, year-round workers in the United States, shows women's median earnings as a percent of men's median earnings. It uses actual data from 1960 through 2011, then projects forward through 2060.

In the 1960s, women's earnings were generally just shy of 60 percent of men's earnings. In 2012 that number had increased to more than 80 percent. That's a significant improvement, but still leaves a substantial pay gap between women and men. ABC/Univision recently detailed a number of reasons for that gap, from discrimination to declining employment opportunities. For more information, go here.

The chart might look dismal, but the real situation could actually be worse than it predicts. According to Jeff Hayes, a study director with the think tank, the 2057 estimate is optimistic.

Hayes said that progress hasn't been a straight line, and that while the wage gap shrank in the 1970s and '80s, that progress slowed in the '90s and tapered off in the 2000s. To reach pay equity by 2057, the current rate of progress would have to remain steady, and that's looking less likely.

He added that some of the acceleration in the '70s and '80s in fact had to do more with men's wages stagnating than women's wages improving.

Pay won't truly be equal until "we make measurable changes," he said, such as passing policies aimed at ending occupational segregation, which results in a disproportionate concentration of men in high-paying, high-status jobs. Women are still more likely to gravitate toward lower paying jobs and to take time off after having a baby than men, which can sometimes slow their ascendance up the career ladder.

The issue has gained widespread media attention recently, with Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg authoring "Lean In," a bestselling book that encourages women not to give in to societal pressure to be nice or demure in ways that limit their ability to tackle career advancement opportunities.

The National Committee on Pay Equity, a coalition of advocacy organizations aimed at ending wage inequality, has declared this coming Tuesday to be Equal Pay Day. The committee launched the annual Equal Pay Day in 1996 to raise awareness about the gap between men's and women's wages. The group wrote online that they chose April 9 because that's "how far into 2013 women must work to earn what men earned in 2012."

But the wage gap issue is complex, and a variety of attempts to eliminate it have fallen short -- and not just in the United States.

"While I think we could do better," Hayes said, "when you look around the world, no one country has solved this. It's still fairly universal."

Heidi Hartmann is president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Updated March 31, 2013, 6:26 PM

Understand the Obstacles

The odds are against single parents who are pursuing an education. More than half of all single parents attending school have low incomes. They're more likely to work full-time jobs on top of school and family responsibilities and frequently need substantial financial aid to complete their degree.

"The immediate need to get some sort of income is often so tempting that oftentimes (single parents) will drop out to work at that minimum-wage job that's not at all fulfilling to them because they need that immediate income ... or because their child care becomes unreliable or unavailable and that juggling becomes just too much," says Katie Kough, director of the Women with Children Program at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pa.

A major challenge facing student-parents is that many colleges and universities cater to traditional students who attend college full time without family responsibilities. Amenities that student-parents need, such as affordable child care facilities, flexible scheduling options and parent support groups, aren't available at every institution.

The Institute for Women's Policy Research estimates that college campuses only supply about 5% of the child care that student-parents actually require. Flexible scheduling options are much more available -- 31% of all college students take at least one course online, reports the 2011 Sloan Online Survey -- but it's still tricky for parents to carve out time to complete assignments without distraction.

"It's really difficult for single parents, especially if they don't have a lot of family support and they're just kind of out on their own," says Elaine Adams, coordinator of the Ecovillage program at Berea College in Berea, Ky. "If they have a family member that can help out, that can make the difference between night and day in them being able to still get to classes and therefore being successful in getting their degree."

How to Get Help

Some colleges such as Berea are stepping in for students who don't have family help. Berea's Ecovillage is one of a handful of residential college programs designed specifically for student-parents. Ecovillage provides family-friendly accommodations for up to 50 single parents and married couples with kids, on-campus day care for preschool-aged kids, after-school programs for children in grades kindergarten through third and free parenting and life skills workshops. Other institutions offer subsidized day care, parent mentoring or free meals on campus to children of students.

"It's a great way for (student-parents) to be able to come and have that support network to be able to be successful parents, but it's also a great way for them to be able to get that education so they can ensure the success of themselves for their child's future as well," says Stephanie Struckhoff, assistant director of residence life for the Mothers Living & Learning program at College of Saint Mary in Omaha, Neb.

Residential student-parent programs make a big difference. In Mothers Living & Learning, for example, 85% of those enrolled in the program for at least one semester make it to graduation. That's more than double the graduation rate as the rest of campus, reports the National Center for Education Statistics.

Only a few accredited schools nationwide offer residential parent programs, but a larger number of institutions offer support initiatives without the residential component. For instance, the University of Massachusetts Amherst offers child care tuition assistance, a discount on home heating oil, a weekday drop-in child care center and free weekly meals and play activities. Even though there's a child care center available on campus, the University of Alabama's Sitters for Service program provides approximately 600 hours of free baby-sitting every semester to graduate students with children.

"(Student-parents) need to be looking for universities that recognize that it is a challenge and who are making efforts to address the challenges that this group of people face," says Katherine Rehner, the graduate parenting support program coordinator who oversees Sitters for Service.

That means seeking out institutions that have parent support groups or advising and mentoring programs. Schools may also offer child care services or connections with local facilities, financial counselors who can help you apply for child care subsidies, emergency loan programs to cover unexpected costs or financial aid awards for students with children.

Kough also recommends exploring schools that have an active student-parent community.

"If (students) feel a part of that institution and feel connected and feel like they matter to that institution, they're probably more likely to work to get their degree," she says.

That's right, people can get away with paying grandma's aide less than $7.25 an hour.

Why? Congress decided in 1974 to lump home health aides in with casual babysitters under labor laws.

President Obama has been trying to change this recently, but the industry is fighting back. The debate all comes down to the meaning of "companionship."

"What they do is static, there's not a lot of effort," said Val Halamandaris, president of the National Association for Home Care & Hospice, referring specifically to companion workers.

"It's in the same category as babysitters. We don't think they should be subject to overtime," he said.

According to the law, minimum wage and overtime are not required for companionship workers, who by definition, spend at least 80% of their workweek merely keeping a patient company. Playing chess or cards would classify as a companionship activity, for example.

Halamandaris said very few home health aide workers actually fit this mold. But a studyreleased by the National Domestic Workers Alliance shows nearly a quarter of home health aides earn below minimum wage.

Worker advocates say employers are exploiting the companionship law and getting away with it.

"It's primarily an outdated, stereotypical idea of what a worker does. This is not the typical way they spend their time," said Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women's Policy Research.

Related: America's fastest growing job pays poorly

Once aides spend more than 20% of their work week doing general household work, like cleaning or making a tuna sandwich, they are supposed to qualify for both minimum wage and overtime.

But are employers truly tracking their aides' duties so accurately that they can make that distinction?

The large agencies say yes, and argue that they should not pay time-and-a-half to workers who often stay overnight with their patients. During that time, an aide may do little other than help a patient walk to the bathroom once or twice.

"There are many seniors that use our services throughout the night in sleepover situations," said Paul Hogan, chairman of Home Instead Senior Care, which plans to hire 45,000 caregivers in North America this year. "This exemption allows us -- to the benefit of seniors -- to discount for those hours."

As Hogan mentions, costs are a big part of the problem. The industry is pressured to keep prices down to accommodate elderly clients, many of whom are living on fixed incomes. Health care reform could also hurt the industry, as $39.5 billion in Medicare funding cuts through 2019 loom.

Home care providers argue that if they're forced to raise wages and pay overtime, they'll have to restrict workers to 40 hours a week to keep costs down. They also warn that if costs rise, seniors might turn to undocumented, unqualified workers instead.

But home care workers are already entitled to state minimum wages in 21 states, and businesses there are still growing. At least 15 of those states also require overtime pay for those who work more than 40 hours a week.

Meanwhile, recent case studies by the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute show some companies have developed business models that allow for higher wages and overtime.

In New York, a group called the Cooperative Home Care Associates keeps overtime costs low by often splitting patients who need 24-7 care among four workers. The group is a worker-owned cooperative employing more than 2,000 people.

Addus Homecare (ADUS), a large Illinois-based company, doesn't consider any of its aides as companion workers. So paying minimum wage and overtime are a requirement, not an option. The company uses scheduling software to distribute hours more efficiently and keep overtime costs low.

Darby Anderson, vice president of home and community services for Addus, said he thinks that as more older consumers demand health care at home, competitors will eventually need to rethink their stance on wages and overtime as well.

Related: Men in female-dominated jobs

Vilma Rozen, an aide working in Staten Island, gets paid more than the minimum wage. She said she realizes why it's important to keep costs down. But she and her colleagues need to make a living.

"People don't understand and they always have a complaint about how much they pay for us," she said. "We need to do the best for the elderly, but we need the job too."

She says many don't recognize being a home health care aide as a legitimate career and wants to band together with other domestic workers to get the job the respect it deserves.

Grassroots movements have already taken off in some states, but with limited success. New York passed a domestic workers bill of rights in 2010, but when workers in California tried to do the same, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed the legislation.

Six years ago, health care aide Evelyn Coke, a single mother of five and immigrant from Jamaica who was not paid minimum wage or overtime, took her case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Coke lost, with the court unanimously ruling that it was up to Congress or the Department of Labor to change the law. Coke died in 2009.

Now, the Labor Department is reviewing 26,000 public comments on the federal proposal. But it's unclear when, if ever, a final rule will be released.

- CNNMoney video producer Jordan Malter and CNN correspondent Zain Ashercontributed to this report.

Women working full-time earned just 80.9 percent of what men earned per week in 2012, slightly below the 82.2 percent they earned in 2011, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research.

That doesn't include part-time or seasonal workers, so those factors aren't skewing the data. The situation has really gotten worse, and the numbers have stagnated around 80 percent beginning in 2004.

Latina women earn 88 percent of what Latino men earn in a week. That might sound better, but it's not. They earn just 59.3 percent, or $521, of the $879 white men earn during that time.

Part of the reason the situation looks more "equal" for Latinos is because employment options typically pursued by Latino men have dropped significantly.

As Ariane Hegewisch, a study director with the institute who helped put the data together, pointed out, earnings increase with education regardless of gender, but Latinos have relatively low levels of higher education.

Hegewisch noted that it used to be easier for Latino men to earn a good living without attending college. Latino men have typically gravitated toward construction and manufacturing jobs, which pay well but don't require a degree. Latina women have skewed toward service jobs that don't pay well.

The mid-level labor market was "pulled apart," Hegewisch said, when the economy began to struggle. Even as the economy has begun to rebound, she added, fewer of those mid-level jobs have returned. That means many Latino men and women have been relegated to badly paying jobs in the lower labor market.

But there are other factors, including discrimination, at play, according to Hegewisch. Women are not being paid for doing the same job in many places, and they're often not being hired into top-level positions. When they are, they're not promoted as high or as often.

The rest she says is a mixture of what she calls "occupational and sector segregation." Women are more likely to work in social services or education. They're more likely to hold jobs in the public sector. While some of those jobs pay well, a teacher with a master's degree earns a lot less than an engineer with a master's degree.

Women are also likely to take time off -- after having a baby, for instance -- and when they do reenter the labor market seeking full-time employment, it can be harder to continue to climb a career ladder. There may also be some reluctance to hire women for high-powered, lucrative jobs when there is the chance that they may take time off in the future to have children, Hegewisch added.

"We still have a glass ceiling," she said.

The country has done a marginally successful job of getting young women into advanced placement classes in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), but there's a long way to go.

"We need to be more proactive in terms of creating protective spaces for girls," Hegewisch said.

Parents need to encourage their daughters to pursue traditionally male-dominated fields, and teachers need to be aware of potential discrimination, however minor it might seem.

Hegewisch recalled a high school that successfully encouraged girls to take auto mechanics. Students were required to wear coveralls, and the class was held across from the boys' changing rooms. The girls had to cross campus to change. The class, Hegewisch said, may have retained more girls if the location were different.

Gender discrimination, Hegewisch said, is also not a priority for policymakers at the federal level.

If more women were involved in policymaking, the wage gap would likely receive more attention, but getting women into office has been a slow process. The number of women in Congress is far from proportional to the country's female population.

Another simple solution, but a key one, is that hiring and promoting women needs to be a priority for companies. And, according to Hegewisch, it simply isn't right now.

Coca Cola, Hegewisch said, is one major company that has been successful in this arena. The company created a program in 2007 aimed at advancing women into leadership positions.

"We believe women are the real drivers of the 21st century and will play a transformative role in shaping the global economy," wrote a spokeswoman for the soda giant in an email. "Our goal is to achieve true diversity."

The company is also an example that improvement is possible. Coca Cola paid more than $150 million to settle a racial discrimination case in 2000, and agreed to appoint a panel charged with holding the company accountable for hiring and promoting more minorities and women.

The company's desire to change, however it was sparked, has resulted in tangible improvement. Hegewisch hopes to see that at the national level, but noted that the country has a long way to go before that's a reality.

"[The gender wage gap] is not seen as a problem by policy makers," Hegewisch said. "We know what goes wrong and we know the tools and how to design it so it shouldn't be such a problem, but it's not really very high on the agenda."

That reality will continue to affect more and more Americans, as growth in this particular portion of the health care industry has been fast — and it’s only going to get faster. Job growth in the American health care sector doubled from January to February, led by strong gains in ambulatory care givers, hospital workers, and home health aides. And as CNN Money points out, an uptick in America’s elderly population — fueled by aging Baby Boomers — will lead to an explosion in demand for such workers’ services.

But due to a loophole in labor protection laws, home health aides often make less than minimum wage, earning about $20,000 per year. And that’s just the full-time workers. Part-time health aides, who make up most of the profession, make even less and don’t receive benefits — leading to a sadly ironic situation in which health workers are often forced to forgo their own health care and turn to government safety net programs:

Under these conditions, it’s no surprise then that about 40% of home aides rely on public assistance, such as Medicaid and food stamps, just to get by.

“What you have is a situation here where the people that we count on to care for our families cannot take care of their own, and that’s got to change,” said Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. [...]

A recent study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research estimates immigrants make up 28% of home health care workers, and of those, one in five are undocumented.

The Census Bureau has found that 53% of home health aides are minorities. By their calculations, it is the single most common job for black women, who alone represent nearly a third of the entire profession.

This is part of the reason workers are undervalued and underpaid, say worker advocates like Eileen Boris, a professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The fact that the populations who are already disproportionately affected by poverty and poor access to essential services are turning to such low-wage, low-benefit jobs is a sad reflection on both America’s economic recovery and holes in the social safety net. In fact, most of the jobs added to the U.S. economy since the recession ended pay low wages.

Under Obamacare, home health aides will serve as essential foot soldiers in the fight to make America’s health care system more efficient. The Obama Administration has been pushing to revamp labor protections for home health aides, but that effort has not enjoyed much success so far.

To be sure, the gender pay gap has been shrinking for decades. But, by one measure, it got worse last year, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research reports. In aggregate, women working full-time earned 80.9% of what men earned in 2012; in 2011, that ratio stood at 82.2%.

There are some disagreements about these figures. The White House has said that women earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn; on the other hand, writes Suzy Khimm, if you totally disregard life choices, like having kids, that number hits 91 cents.

But the plain truth is that women often get paid less for doing the exact same jobs as men. Planet Money recently compiled a list of the jobs with the biggest gender pay gaps. They found that female insurance salespeople, financial advisors, physicians and surgeons get paid roughly 60-70% of what their male counterparts do. On the other end of the spectrum, female counselors are paid 2.6% more than men.

Though the gender pay gap tends to narrow when you compare similar jobs, as the St Louis Fed notes, there’s a still a depressingly 1950s breakdown of what professions men and women enter:

Men are more likely to be lawyers, doctors and business executives, while women are more likely to be teachers, nurses and office clerks. This gender occupational segregation might be a primary factor behind the wage gap.

Lisa Pollack has a nice two-part guide to some of the other thorny studies on gender and pay. She highlights one study which finds that women get paid less because they don’t ask for raises, though the study looked only at administrative assistant jobs. Another study found that women get more raises than men, but it only examined small companies.

One thing we do know is that gender inequality in pay is pervasive. It cuts across race, and it applies to both hourly and full-time workers, Dylan Matthews notes. It also starts as soon as women graduate from college. Since 1979, the BLS says, women have gone from earning roughly 60% of what men earn, to somewhere near 80%. Still, “men’s economic privilege has been dented rather than eroded,” Mathews writes.

That requirement stretches to all employers with more than 50 workers. And as Yahoo!’s Rachel Rose Hartman learns, it covers the very place where that requirement originated: The White House.

Except, in Hartman’s situation, things were a bit tricky — she’s a reporter who works at the White House but not for the White House. That means that Yahoo! would, as the Affordable Care Act is written, be the one responsible for providing a lactation space.

“I was told the absence of a lactation room for the press had been a concern for the White House but that no current solution existed,” she recounts in the piece for The Ticket. “Under the president’s law, the onus is on my employer to provide a space to pump.”

Hartman’s situation was ultimately resolved, but not because the Affordable Care Act required any changes:

Finally, on January 25, Henry announced the WHCA had brokered an agreement with the Christian Broadcasting Network and CBC/Radio-Canada to use the booth the two news organizations share as a pumping space.

It has changed my life.

Each morning I email out the estimated times I would like to use the booth and we work out a schedule.

Women’s health groups expect that this part of the Affordable Care Act will actually increase the numbers of women who breast-feed. Right now, employed mothers breast-feed at a rate 15 percent below that of unemployed mothers. Combining the required access to lactation rooms with required insurance coverage of breast pumps — a subject I wrote about here — the Institute for Women’s Policy Research expects the breast-feeding rate to rise from 44.5 to 47.5 percent due to these changes.

With all of this attention and even some legislation, you might think that we’re making progress toward closing the gap between men and women’s earnings. You’d be wrong. In fact, a new report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research out today shows that the gap between median annual earnings for men and women working full time was lower in 2011 than in 2010 – and in fact equal to the gap as it stood in 2009. Median weekly earnings for full-time workers saw a gap of 80.9 percent in 2012, declining more than a whole percentage point since the year before. (Keep in mind all you gender gap naysayers: this is for full-time employees. Factoring in women’s “choices” to go part-time or take time off from their careers would make the gap even larger.)

What’s particularly strange about this is that the wage gap typically narrows during a recession, as Ariane Hegewisch of IWPR told me. “This is because men are more likely to work in jobs with high bonus payments and overtime work; in a recession discretionary payments such as merit pay tend to go down,” and men are the primary recipients of these lavish rewards.

What’s worse, though, is that this latest speed bump is dwarfed by the slowdown in progress since the 1990s, as can be seen in the graph above. As the report notes, “Since 2001 the annual gender earnings gap narrowed by only about one percentage point. In the previous decade, from 1991 to 2000, it closed by almost four, and in the decade prior to that, 1981 to 1990, by over ten percentage points.” Where we were making solid progress toward true gender parity in pay, recent decades have seen it trickle to a slow crawl.

So what’s going on here? No one is quite sure yet why the recent slowdown has occurred. Hegewisch posited that men’s bonuses may be returning to normal, increasing the gap. Another important factor is likely that the public sector has been shedding so many jobs, a place where women hold a large share of employment. The jobs there are also higher paying and tend to employ more educated women – so as they lost those jobs, they brought the average compensation for female workers down with them.

The longer-term path of stagnation that we’ve been on for the past two decades is caused by two factors: women’s earnings going up and men’s earnings stagnating or going down. Women saw a huge boost from doors opening for higher-level jobs thanks to Title IX and more equal access to education and Title VII. Mothers also entered and stayed in jobs more rapidly during that time. At the same time, men’s real wages suffered from the decline in manufacturing and anti-union policies. “Women’s earnings tended to be so low that the only way was up,” Hegewisch summed up.

It’s a complex problem, and so far we’ve tried to address it with minimal solutions. But our efforts aren’t paying off. Women are backsliding.

The pay gap between male and female workers widened last year for the first time since the beginning of the economic recovery. Women earned 80.9 percent of what men earned in 2012, compared to 82.2 percent in 2011, according to a study released Thursday by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Male workers saw their pay go up slightly from 2011, while women workers made a little bit less than they did in 2011. As a result women made about $163 dollars less per week in 2012 than men.

The widening pay gap can largely be explained by the types of jobs women are gaining and losing, Ariane Hegewisch, one of the study’s researchers told The Huffington Post. In 2012, government budget tightening led to cuts in public sector jobs, which disproportionately affected women. At the same time, job growth for women came in low-paying sectors like retail and service.

“Public sector jobs for women -- especially at the state and local level -- were cut during 2012, they might go further during the sequester,” she said. “Public sector jobs are good jobs for women because they’re median- and higher-qualified jobs. They’re good middle-income jobs and when budgets are cut those jobs go.”

As women lose better-paying jobs and gain worse-paying ones, job growth in male-dominated, relatively well-paying sectors like manufacturing, construction and car sales has been on the rise. Men suffered more job losses during the recession and as the recovery progresses, they’re catching up, Hegewisch says.

“Men always had middle-income, better-paying jobs so they’re getting those jobs back,” she said.

It’s common for the gender wage gap to narrow during recessions and grow during boom times, according to Hegewisch.

“Typically what you get in recessions is that the wage gap shrinks because things like overtime disappear and nobody gets much merit pay or bonuses," Hegewisch said. “Then in boom times it grows, because bonuses and overtime come back and women tend to get less of those.”

Women may be getting paid less for years to come. If the current rate of progress on closing the gender pay gap continues, it will take 45 more years -- or until 2056 -- for women earn as much as men, the study found. That has real consequences for women workers over a lifetime. Women make $434,000 less on average over the course of their career than men, according to a fact sheet from the Democratic Policy and Communications Center.