Why Do We Need #EqualPayDay?
Today (March 24) is #EqualPayDay. The selection of the date (March 24) represents the number of days in this year (2021) women have to work, in addition to all the days in 2020, to earn the same amount men earned in 2020 for the same work.
If you are like me, you struggle to believe these facts:
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- Women make 82 cents compared to $1 made by men for the same work.
- This number is 63 cents for Black women (so #BlackWomensEqualPayDay is August 3)
- This number is 55 cents for Latina women (55 cents!!!) (#LatinaEqualPayDay is October 21.)
The facts have a conceptuality about them which can make them hard to understand. So how does this happen? These figures represent wages not just today, but over the life of a person’s career, and if you consider these situations, the disparity makes more sense:
1) Women are the primary parents to take maternity leave. As many of us know, maternity leave is a physical necessity, so women’s bodies can recuperate, and it is largely at least partially if not fully unpaid. For the women whose work isn’t protected by FMLA, their job may be threatened altogether by this event. Economically speaking, we should not be penalizing women for this essential function of contributing to the pool of future consumers (as there’s no other way for future consumers to be created.) Guys, push for, and take, paternity leave!
2) It should be no surprise at this point that the pandemic has had a significant impact on women and their lifetime earnings. With children home, many women have dropped out of the workforce to care for their children and supervise school, a particularly devastating impact for single parent households (the majority of which are led by women.) And the pandemic is an example of the way women often are the family’s primary caregivers, for which similar family needs often impact their earnings.
3) The idea of “death by a thousand cuts” also applies. Women in the workplace may suffer from one or many of these situations which exclude them from power: implicit/unconscious bias against women, lack of powerful mentors or champions to help them advance and increase earnings, and lack of advocacy among decision makers for women overall or for paying attention to gender equity issues of all kinds
4) And, there are some organizations for whom salary gender parity is not a goal, and they offer people the least amount they can to hire a qualified candidate. If this is a woman, who doesn’t advocate for herself or have access to transparent data regarding salary equity, she may just be paid less.
Like many similar issues, what’s the first step in solving this? Awareness: hence #EqualPayDay today, and for Black and Latina women later this year. Spread the word.