The Sin of the Clergy Pay Gap

Last week, my fellow clergy sisters and I were hit with a gut punch when the new information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was released. For the first time, clergy income was reported, and, lo and behold, women made seventy-six cents for every dollar that men made, a substantially larger gap than the eighty-three cents to the dollar nationally. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, but knowing that there’s a gap is different from seeing those numbers in black and white and seeing them in comparison to other, similar professions.