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Caryn Riswold

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Equal Pay Today! (for last year anyway …)

Equal Pay Today! (for last year anyway …)

Last updated on: April 9, 2013 at 8:30 am by Caryn Riswold

Equal Pay Today! (for last year anyway …) 2013-04-04T10:26:40-06:00 Caryn Riswold

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Congrats, ladies! We did it! As of today, we’ve worked long enough into the new year to earn what our male counterparts earned during the last calendar year.

Calendar check: April 9, 2013.

That’s right. The guys have been done since December 31, 2012. Or more precisely, they’ve been getting a head start on this year while women are still catching up from last year.

See why catching up seems (is?) impossible?

Today is Equal Pay Day:

Equal Pay Day was originated by the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) in 1996 as a public awareness event to illustrate the gap between men’s and women’s wages. …

Because women earn less, on average, than men, they must work longer for the same amount of pay. The wage gap is even greater for most women of color.

That last point is particularly important, because as women overall are earning about 80 cents on the male dollar, African American women earn about 64 cents, with Hispanic women earning 52 cents. Race matters.

A bit of history, from the U.S. Department of Labor:

When the Equal Pay Act was signed into law by President Kennedy in 1963, women were earning an average of 59 cents on the dollar compared to men. While women hold nearly half of today’s jobs, and their earnings account for a significant portion of the household income that sustains the financial well-being of their families, they are still experiencing a gap in pay compared to men’s wages for similar work. Today, women earn about 80 cents on the dollar compared to men — a gap that results in the loss of about $380,000 over a woman’s career. For African-American women and Latinas, the pay gap is even greater.

Each year, National Equal Pay Day reflects how far into the current year women must work to match what men earned in the previous year. On National Equal Pay Day, we rededicate ourselves to carrying forward the fight for true economic equality for all.

Reasons why this gap persists are manifold, and written about by many scholars and reporters.

For a comprehensive chart and discussion about the race and gender issues, head over to The Feminist Anthropologist, who points out that this intersection perhaps matters the most:

The wage gap affects working women, but it also affects men of color, single-parent families, and poverty levels. Media coverage of the wage gap needs to include these groups that are affected the most, not just focus on white women vs. white men. Feminism does not own the fight against the wage gap. This fight belongs to men and women of color, families in poverty, gay and transgender workers, as well as women everywhere.

Finally, Bryce Covert writes about what can and should be done to make equal pay a reality. Head over to her piece at Forbes for some specifics on what the federal government could do to address the systemic inequalities that produce this persistent problem.

Then, get back to work.

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