This morning, EPI released our Women’s Economic Agenda (and an accompanying research paper)—a set of policies designed to close the gender wage gap and ensure that women achieve real, lasting economic security.

In the last several decades women have made great strides in educational attainment and labor force participation. Nevertheless, when compared with men, women are still paid less, are more likely to hold low-wage jobs, and are more likely to live in poverty. And the problem is worse for women of color. As demonstrated in numerous research studies, gender wage disparities are present across the wage distribution and within education, occupations, and sectors, sometimes to a grave degree.

Closing the gender wage gap is absolutely essential to helping women achieve economic security. But to bring genuine economic success to American women and their families, we must do more. The gender wage gap is only one way the economy shortchanges women.

At the same time the gender wage gap has persisted, hourly wages for the vast majority of workers have stagnated, as the fruits of increased productivity and a growing economy have accrued to those at the top. It hasn’t always been this way. As you can see in the figure below, pay rose with productivity in the three decades following World War II. But since the 1970s, pay and productivity have grown further apart, as the result of intentional policy decisions that eroded the leverage of the vast majority of workers to secure higher wages.

A progressive women’s economic agenda, one that seeks to truly maximize women’s economic potential, must focus on both closing the gender wage gap and raising wages more generally.

The bottom line on the figure below shows the median hourly wage for women from 1979 to 2014. As you can see, women’s hourly wages have seen a small rise over the last 35 years. Men’s hourly wages (the blue line) dropped slightly over the same period. So the gender wage gap has narrowed, but 40 percent of that narrowing occurred because of falling men’s wages. Gender wage parity does not improve women’s economic prospects to the greatest possible extent if wages for men and women remain equal but stagnant in the future.

Meanwhile, the green line in the figure represents the potential for overall wages to rise over the last 35 years. It tells us that if the gains to a growing economy hadn’t disproportionately gone to the top, then there would have been plenty of room for both men’s and women’s wages to increase and to close the gender wage gap. In fact, if we had closed both gaps, women’s wages today would be 70 percent higher.

To maximize women’s economic security, we must raise wages by pursuing policies that intentionally tilt bargaining power back toward low- and moderate-wage workers, and we must end discriminatory policies that contribute to the gender wage gap. We should seek to close the gender wage gap by “leveling up”—spurring women’s wages to catch up to men’s while both men and women share in overall growth.

Only when we take a holistic approach to women’s wages and seek to close both the gender gap and the inequality gap will women reach their potential in the economy, which will have long-lasting effects on American families.