The Original Witch Hunt Was About Work, Too

The Gap That Compounds: Which Women Get to Build Wealth?

By Sarah McIntyre, CEO, Culture CFO

The witches are coming down off front porches all over my neighborhood, packed away until next October. This year, I have been thinking about them a little differently.

Historian Silvia Federici argues that the witch hunts of early modern Europe were about more than superstition. They came alongside major economic change, and most of the people accused were women: healers, midwives, widows, and women who earned or held something of their own. Part of what was at stake, in her telling, was who controlled women’s work, and which of that work would count.

I first heard that history at Women’s Way’s Gender Wealth Summit in Philadelphia in October, and it stuck with me. Not because today looks like the 1600s, but because the question underneath it has not gone away: whose work gets counted, and whose gets quietly left off the books?

Pay is a snapshot. Wealth is the running balance.

In my last post, “Women Are Not a Line Item,” I looked at the pay side of this conversation. The summit pushed me to look further down the ledger. A pay gap shows up on one paycheck. A wealth gap is what accumulates across decades of smaller paychecks, slower promotions, stepped-back careers, and unpaid caregiving.

Anyone who has built a forecast will recognize the math. It works like compound interest in reverse:

• A lower starting salary becomes the base for every future raise.
• When employers ask about salary history, that lower number follows a person from job to job.
• Smaller paychecks mean smaller retirement contributions and a smaller employer match, with less time to grow.
• A career pause for caregiving, or stepping back during a health transition, interrupts all of the above at once.

In Pennsylvania, women earned 82.4% of what men earned in 2024. Run that difference forward through raises, retirement, and savings, and the gap at 65 is far larger than the gap on any single pay stub.

The averages hide the spread

The gap is not the same for everyone. In Pennsylvania, Black women typically earn about 65 cents for every dollar paid to white men, and Latinas about 57 cents. Lean In and McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2025 shows a similar pattern inside corporate America:

• Women of color make up 21% of entry-level employees but 7% of the C-suite.
• Three in 10 companies say they place little or no priority on advancing women of color.

These numbers are not about blame. They are a starting point, and numbers are something every leader can work with.

The work that never shows up on the books

Brigid Schulte’s Over Work, which I wrote about earlier this year, picks up where that history leaves off. Her argument is that overwork is not a personal failing to fix with better sleep or a vacation. It is built into how many workplaces measure and reward people.

Schulte describes the “ideal worker” norm: the employee who arrives early, stays late, answers at night, and has no one at home who needs them. Companies, she argues, often measure hours and visibility instead of results. Meanwhile, the unpaid work of caregiving and running a household falls mostly on women, never appears in a budget, and quietly limits who can show up as that ideal worker.

That is the wealth gap in motion. Caregivers step back to part-time or step out entirely, and their paychecks, promotions, and retirement accounts all slow down at the same time.

Schulte also points out that the same pattern shows up when care becomes a job. Fields where most of the workers are women, like teaching, nursing, and childcare, tend to pay less than fields with similar education and responsibility, and she notes that two-thirds of the lowest-paying jobs in the U.S. are held by women. The data backs her up. Teachers earned 27% less than comparable college graduates in 2024, a record gap, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Research by sociologists Asaf Levanon, Paula England, and Paul Allison found that as more women enter a field, its pay tends to fall. The work does not change. How we value it does.

Schulte is also clear about what changes when the system changes. In Reykjavik, Iceland, a trial cut employees’ hours without cutting pay. Fathers took on more caregiving, and more mothers returned to full-time work. She cautions that Iceland is not a model the U.S. can simply copy. But it shows that when you redesign the system, the results change with it.

What I keep coming back to

Systems produce the results they were designed to produce. Anyone who has rebuilt a chart of accounts or an approval workflow knows this. When a report keeps showing the same result, you look at how the system was set up, not at individual entries. The wealth gap works the same way, which means it can be adjusted the same way.

Work that is not recorded is not valued. Caregiving, running a household, the quiet work of holding a team together: it is essential, and it rarely appears on the books. In my world, what is not recorded is not measured, what is not measured is not valued, and what is not valued does not build wealth.

Some patterns repeat. From the witch trials to today’s debates about women’s work and families, versions of the same conversation keep resurfacing. Recognizing the pattern makes it easier to have a calmer, clearer conversation when it comes up again.

Where leaders can start

You do not need to agree on every part of the history to act on the numbers. Many of the decisions that shape the wealth gap are made by finance and HR, and most of them are simply good practice:

1. Set starting pay without salary history. Philadelphia employers are already barred from asking. Price the role, not the person’s past pay.
2. Check the base before you apply the raise. An across-the-board percentage increase on an uneven base widens the gap in dollars every year.
3. Look at retirement participation. Who is enrolled, who is getting the full match, and who is not? Plan design choices like auto-enrollment make a real difference.
4. Reward results, not availability. If promotions quietly favor whoever is always online, you are measuring the ideal worker, not the best one.
5. Make the numbers visible. You cannot close a gap you do not measure. Clean payroll and benefits data is the foundation for every one of these decisions. In the EU, large employers are already required to report their gender pay gap, and new pay transparency laws are rolling out country by country through 2027. Even if you are not covered, the direction is clear.

Let’s keep talking

On November 12, Women’s Way’s 18th Annual Book Prize honors economist Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman for The Double Tax: How Women of Color Are Overcharged and Underpaid. It is a free virtual conversation, and I plan to be there. Register at womensway.org/BP18.

I don’t have all the answers. What I have found is that the most useful conversations start with shared numbers and genuine curiosity. So I’ll leave you with a question: what is one decision in your organization, a starting offer, a raise formula, a benefits default, that you have never looked at through this lens? Tell me, or join me on November 12.

The wealth gap is not built in one decision. It is built in thousands of small ones. That also means it can be narrowed the same way, one decision at a time.

Halloween may be over, but the scariest number in your budget is still the one you never measured.