Monday marks 50 years since the Equal Pay Act was signed into law by President John F. Kennedy as an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act. The law stipulates that women must be paid equal wages for equal work. Yet a half century later,the gender wage gap still stands at 77 cents earned by a woman for every dollar a man makes. Here are some other reasons why progress has been glacially slow since 1963:

1. The wage gap has widened recently. The gender wage gap was wider in 2011 than in 2010 and was actually at the same level as in 2009. Back in the 1980s, the gap narrowed by more than 10 percentage points. But it’s only closed by about one percentage point since 2001. While the gap stood at just above 60 cents on the dollar when the Equal Pay Act went into effect, we’ve all but stopped making progress on closing it completely.

2. Women’s choices can’t explain the gender wage gap. The Government Accountability Office looked at whether factors such as job tenure, industry and occupation, work patterns, race, and marital status could explain the gender wage gap. Yet when it stripped them out, it still found an 80 percent gap that it couldn’t account for.

3. Women earn less than men no matter how much education they get. It’s widely known that women are graduating college in greater numbers than men and that higher education gives workers a wage boost. Yet it’s not enough to close the gap. Researchers have found that young women fresh out of college experience a 7 percent wage gap compared to their male peers at their first job. That gap follows them no matter how much more education they seek out: at every level of higher ed, women make less than men,earning $1,417 less for a business degree and a full $2,610 less for an advanced degree in science.

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http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/06/10/2128041/equal-pay-act-anniversary/