Trailing behind white, Black, and Indigenous women, Latina women make just 57 cents for every dollar earned by white men. This gap is even wider for Latinas with college degrees. In addition to wages, Latinas face a benefit gap, often working jobs without benefits that promote wealth and stability, such as retirement accounts, paid time off, and health care.

These disparities are largely driven by occupational segregation and systemic racism (PDF), which crowd Latinas into low-paying jobs. Though not a monolithic group, Latinas face many intersecting barriers to pay equity in the workforce, including discrimination based on race, ethnicity, color, class, and gender. Structural factors, such as immigration status and language barriers, further impede Latinas’ access to higher-earning positions.

Amid persistent structural racism, policies that expand Latinas’ access to benefits can help them realize their full earning potential. By expanding access to health care, retirement plans, and child care, states can begin to break down these barriers, improve job quality, and enable Latina workers to thrive.

Key challenges facing Latina workers

Latinas stand to lose $1.2 million dollars (PDF) to the wage gap over the course of a 40-year career. When part-time workers are included, this gap widens. Disproportionately represented among low-wage workers, Latinas make up one-third of the service industry and 28 percent of the agriculture workforce, which often lack access to benefits. Although many service jobs are deemed essential, they offer few opportunities for mobility, leaving Latinas economically vulnerable.

Only 18 percent (PDF) of Latinas have access to employer-sponsored retirement accounts, compared with 78 percent of white men. In addition, fewer than 58 percent of Latinas have access to health care through their employers. Low-paying jobs, like farm work, also lack federal job protections, such as the right to collectively bargain or claim overtime, which makes Latinas more susceptible to exploitation, termination, and hazardous environments compared with workers in other industries.

Although the US child care system heavily depends on Latinas and other women of color, Latinas often face challenges in accessing affordable child care. Often the primary earners in their households, many Latinas face unaffordable and limited child care options that place them in a financially precarious position. Some Latinas even opt to leave the workforce to take care of their children, disrupting their ability to earn money for themselves and their families and contributing to the ongoing wage gap.

How states can support Latina workers

Improving job quality and access to benefits can help Latinas achieve better earning outcomes and enable them to thrive. Here are three ways states can begin to close the benefits and pay gap for Latinas:

1. Expand access to health care. In 2021, the American Rescue Plan expanded health care coverage for low-wage workers in many states by making plans more affordable. State-based marketplaces (SBMs) played a critical role in connecting uninsured people with these subsidized plans through creative advertising approaches and customer assistance. SBMs can help bridge linguistic barriers and promote awareness of resources among historically uninsured communities, like Latinas.
2. Provide alternatives to private-sector retirement plans. States have begun implementing automatic individual retirement accounts, or auto-IRAs, to help close the racial retirement gap. By automatically enrolling workers, auto-IRAs aim to make saving for retirement more accessible and equitable for low-wage workers, who are disproportionately women and people of color and who often lack access to retirement benefits through their employer. These programs can also help workers at smaller companies, or in industries where employer-sponsored retirement plans are less common, save for retirement.
3. Improve access to child care. State tax policy can play a role in making affordable and quality child care more widely available through tax credits. Such measures can help support working families, allow women to save more money, and improve retention of Latina workers.

In the US, a worker’s benefits are tied to her employer. Like states, employers could do more to support the economic stability of Latinas by closing the benefit gap and creating better-quality jobs. As the second largest group of women workers in the US, Latinas play a consequential role in the economy (PDF). Addressing the benefits and wage gap can have mutually beneficial outcomes for both Latinas and their employers by improving retention, supporting productivity, and creating a healthier work environment.