The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to the froth is nonlinear edition of Slate Money.

It's your weekly guide, I hope, to the Business and Finance News of the Week.

I'm Kathy O'Neill. I'm in for Felix Salmon this week.

On the show, we pick up where we left off last week with a gender gap and a new argument that it might close on its own.

Hmm. We'll ponder whether China is the next Japan, whatever that means, and we'll do our best to explain why so many companies are buying back their own shares.

With me in New York is Slate's own moneybox columnist, Jordan Weissman,

and we also have a very special guest to help us through Felix's sad absence,

Cardiff Garcia of F.T. Alphaville. Cardiff, you want to say a couple words about yourself and

your background? Sure. I am the U.S. editor of F.T. Alphaville and as funky as that title sounds, I'm really just a blogger.

Alphaville is the flagship economics and finance blog of the Financial Times, and we write about all kinds of quirky and nerdy things.

So if your previous podcast or any indication, I think I'm going to fit right in.

Also, I'd like to add, Cardiff is widely run out as a avid kickboxer. Is that right? I do something called Muay Thai, Thai boxing. That is, okay, I'm not going to say anything to offend you. Also, I just want to throw in that FT Alphaville is not behind the paywall, and that's

nice as well. We like that about it, and it's nerdy, so we definitely like that. Okay, well,

so today we're going to start with Jordan. Jordan, you're an expert on the gender gap in pay.

Can you start us off? So the Census Bureau came out with its annual report on income and poverty, which also tells

us about the gender gap every year.

And it reported that women made 78 cents on the dollar compared to men.

This is the smallest gap in U.S. history.

So we're seeing incremental progress.

And one of the nice things about that is it actually means that younger women are probably making even more relative to men because it's going to be skewed slightly by baby boomers who make, who comparatively don't have a larger gap.

Before you go on, because I'm a data nerd and I need to know exactly what you mean by any statistic, are these like men who are working versus women who are working?

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