Ashish KothariMake flourishing your competitive edge

The $19,750 Stat: A Wake Up Call for the American Workforce

8 May 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:38

Ashish Kothari and MIT professor Zeynep Tant discuss a statistic that stopped them cold: 50 million American women, nearly 45% of the workforce, earn a median of $19,750 annually from their primary job. The number underscores how many women are stuck in low-pay, insecure work.

Chapters

In fact, you know, Megan, I'm actually collaborating now. We've just started very, very early days with Zeynep Tant. She's a professor of operations at MIT. She wrote a book called "Case for Good Jobs," and she's been on this mission for the last 13, 14 years now. This is the stat that is in the book that like shook me to the core. Even though I was doing this work around flourishing, I was blind to it, and I wanna share that stat here with our listeners. 50 million women working Americans, 45% of the workforce, their median pay from their primary employer is $19,750. So think about them.