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have major loopholes in those protections that allow employers to continue to pay women less than their male counterparts. For example • Louisiana's equal pay protections only apply to public employers in the state. Public employers generally have a more transparent pay structure than do their private counterparts, leaving a major hole in the state's oth- erwise relatively comprehensive equal pay legal structure. • Several states, including Arizona, do not prohibit employers from retali- ating against employees who take action to remedy wage discrimination, which makes it risky for women to come forward. As a result, localities such as Phoenix are passing their own protective regulations. FIGURE 10 Map of States with Equal Pay Provisions, 2016 • No equal pay law • Weak equal pay taw • Moderate equal pay law • Strong equal pay law Source: AAU W 26 The estimate of the pay gap using weekly earnings is based on the annual average of median weekly earnings for the previous year, usually released in January of each year by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (wwwbls.gov/cps). The estimate of the pay gap using annual earnings is based on the CPS Annual Social and Economic Supplement, which is published each September by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The CPS provides more detailed information on income compared with other government surveys. In recent years, this information has been published in the report Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States (Proctor et al., 2016). State -level data A pay gap can also be calculated for each state (Figure 2). The American Community Survey (ACS) (wwwcensus.gov/acs) is a detailed annual survey distributed to a broad sample of U.S. households, and it supplements the U.S. census of all Americans, which only occurs once per decade. The ACS is often used (including in this report) to estimate more detailed analyses of subpopulations and geographical areas, such as the pay gap at the state level and for smaller racial/ethnic groups (e.g., Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander and American Indian and Alaska Native workers) because it includes more households—approximately 3 million per year, compared with the 100,000 surveyed in the CPS (U.S. Census Bureau, 2016a). The ACS results are released annually in September, and briefs based on the sur- vey can be found on the Census Bureau's website. According to ACS data, in 2015 the pay gap was smallest in New York, where women were paid 89 percent of what men were paid, and largest in Wyoming, where women were paid 64 percent of what men were paid (Figure 2).