Utah's low wages hit single parents hard

Utah has an above-average share of low-wage workers — with single parents faring particularly poorly.

The big picture: It's not just teenagers and affluent moms with Etsy shops driving down Utah's wages, researchers with Oxfam America reported in a study last week.

By the numbers: More than 25% of Utah workers make less than $17 per hour, compared to a national average of about 23%.

• That's more than 457,000 people in the state.

Zoom in: That includes nearly 51% of Utah's single parents — the 7th-highest rate in the nation, exceeding even high-poverty states like West Virginia and Alabama.

• 34% of Utah's working mothers make less than $17, also the nation's 7th-highest rate and higher than the national average of 28%. By contrast, only 16.5% of Utah dads are paid that little — slightly better than the national average.

Between the lines: Utah's gender wage gap is famously one of the widest in the nation — something skeptics often attribute to the high number of moms who stop working full-time while their kids are young.

• That adds a lot of part-time wage earners to the state's statistics and creates an experience gap that many women's earnings never recover from.

Reality check: Utah's high rate of single parents earning low wages challenges the popular image of the Utah mom who joins an MLM or launches an online crafting business to spend money while she tends to the children and her husband brings home the main paycheck.

• Women here are increasingly working less than a year after giving birth, and national data shows women start with lower pay straight out of college .

Meanwhile, workers of color are far likelier than white workers to make less than $17 per hour — 33% vs 24.4%.

• Yes, but: Male workers of color are less likely to earn below $17 than women of any race in Utah, Oxfam reported.

Zoom out: Nationally, the share of workers making low wages dropped sharply in recent years, Axios' Emily Peck reports .

• Wages are higher now in part because of inflation, and a strong labor market where lower-wage employees are still in high demand.
• "Because people had more money, they were able to hold out for higher-paying positions," says Kaitlyn Henderson, a senior researcher at Oxfam, who wrote the report.

Context: The states with the highest proportion of low-wage workers include those like Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas, which — like Utah — use the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour.

• That low floor pulls down pay for other lower-wage earners.
• Other states have far higher minimum wages. Washington state's is $16.28, for example, and only about 11% of its workforce is earning less than $17 an hour, per Oxfam.

Follow the money: A single adult with no children needs to make $22.52 per hour to earn a living wage in Utah, per MIT's Living Wage Calculator .

• In a family with two working parents, each would need to make at least $30.49 to support themselves and three children.