Happy Equal Pay Day? Here are 6 charts showing why it’s not much of a celebration.By Chabeli Carrazana, Jasmine Mithani Despite progress in other areas of American life, women are still facing discrimination in the workplace — and it’s showing up in their paychecks. As Equal Pay Day has evolved, the calculation has changed to be more representative of all types of workers, a recognition that one of the drivers of the gap is the fact that women are more likely to work in lower paid jobs and in part-time positions. Also until recently, wages were only analyzed in the gender binary, comparing men and women. Data on LGBTQ+ Americans has been at best limited and at worst nonexistent. Advocates now mark Equal Pay Day for LGBTQ+ people during Pride month in June, a symbolic placement that is used to raise awareness to the fact that the country still doesn’t know what the pay gap is for nonbinary Americans and trans people. Occupational segregation, the reality that women are concentrated in certain jobs, typically low-paid service sector positions, drives half of the gender pay gap, according to the National Partnership for Women & Families. But for decades, employers claimed that women were more likely to be in those jobs out of choice, said Aniela Unguresan, the founder of the EDGE Certified Foundation, a leading certifier of diversity, equity and inclusion for businesses across the globe. Much of her work focuses on the gender pay gap. “For a very long time we thought that's a fact of life — there is nothing we can do about it. [Women] don't want those positions of power and authority. They don't aspire to them,” Unguresan said. In recent decades it’s become clear that’s not the case, she said. Studies have found that the inhospitable culture for women in fields dominated by men — stereotypes of them as caregivers or perceptions that they are less qualified — combined with paltry paid leave benefits and limited representation is what has blocked women from entering those fields, not lack of desire or ambition. And regardless of the industry, whether it’s the legal field of the service sector, the gender pay gap is visible in almost every single occupation when comparing average wages for men and women. Occupational segregation, then, occurs when there is no pipeline for women to enter into different fields — and it hurts women of color especially.
The pay gap is so prevalent, in fact, that it’s visible in every state in the country. The gap is typically wider across the South, where many women of color are concentrated, and in states where women make up larger shares of the workforce in low-wage jobs. In Nevada, for example, women are most likely to work as housekeepers. In Utah, they’re most likely to be customer service representatives. In Louisiana, they’re most likely to be elementary and middle school teachers. A combination of race and job distribution, as well as minimum wage laws and job protections, factor into each state’s gap. The other driver of the pay gap is continuing discrimination, and perhaps one of the clearest examples of how it plays out is in looking at what happens to the pay gap as women age. Conventional notions of men as breadwinners and women as caregivers are so entrenched that women are still seeing penalties to their pay after they become mothers — or, regardless of if they have children, around the age when women typically become mothers. Men who have children instead get a bonus in pay, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center. According to Pew, younger women ages 25 to 34 have been edging closer to parity with men over the years, but then the gap begins to widen as they age. A good share of that widening happens when women are between 35 and 44, the ages when they are most likely to have children under 18 at home. Because the United States is one of only about a handful of countries on the planet that doesn’t offer paid family leave, women who have children are often expected to return to work within mere weeks of giving birth. A quarter of moms return to work two weeks after childbirth. But most daycares won’t take children until they are at least six weeks old — if parents can even find a spot and pay for the expense. The cost of child care exceeds the cost of in-state public college tuition in 34 states and Washington, D.C. This broken care system makes it difficult for mothers to stay in the workforce. About 1.4 million younger mothers left the workforce in 2022, Pew found. When they return, they are often returning at lower pay and are routinely passed over for promotions due to stereotypes that they are less committed to their jobs. Closing a gap that has been frozen for decades will have to come through legislation, advocates said. One potential piece of legislation is the Paycheck Fairness Act, which was reintroduced in Congress last week. The bill would strengthen existing equal pay legislation, barring employers from asking about a worker’s salary history, and, in cases of alleged discrimination, employers would have to prove why a pay disparity exists. The bill was first introduced in 1997 and has yet to pass. Even still, some argue that the proposal doesn’t go far enough. Unguresan, who works with Fortune 500 companies in the United States and Europe, said the key differentiator in why Europe has been more successful in closing the gap is legislation around quotas for women in certain jobs, expansive paid leave benefits and pay transparency reporting. Unlike in the United States, those are matters of the law and not a company’s choice, she said. Take the quota legislation in France — executive teams and boards have to be made up of 40 percent women by 2030. When France first enacted a quota for executive boards more than a decade ago, the share of women shot up from 10 percent in 2009 to 45 percent in 2019. “Europe has many more regulations and legislation. … You can hate them, you can love them, but you cannot ignore them,” Unguresan said. “The law is the law — that’s it.” This story was originally published by The 19th, March 14, 2023. |
Tag: "#MINIMUM WAGE"
How? You may ask. The answer is simple – ballot measures – but the execution takes careful planning, hard work and financing.
According to Wikipedia: The Fairness Project is a United States 501(c)(4) charitable organization created in October 2015. They promote general economic and social justice throughout the US by the use of ballot measures to circumvent deadlocks in law changes by the legislative and executive branches of government. They act as a national body by supporting state organizations and campaigns with targeted funding rather than by direct campaigning. They support the gathering of signatures to meet the variable requirements to trigger ballots in states and then aid the campaigns with early financial backing, strategic advice, and various campaign tools.
The Project seeks to raise state minimum wages, both through stepped annual increases and through elimination of the tip credit exemption. It has expanded Medicaid coverage and provided funding in the most expensive ballot campaigns ever fought. Usually alongside their other campaigns, the Fairness Project has supported improving paid sick leave coverage. Following Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the Project has also supported legalizing abortion via statewide ballot initiatives. The Project has supported 17 proposals in total, of which 16 have passed. Concerns have arisen about the lack of transparency of non-state organizations like the Fairness Project influencing local decisions.
The following is the March 6, 2023, media release from The Fairness Project, proudly explaining who they are and what they do.
Fairness Project Featured on NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’
Washington, DC — On Friday, the Fairness Project was featured on NPR’s flagship news show, All Things Considered, which highlighted the nonpartisan nonprofit’s record of winning ballot measure campaigns on progressive issues in red and purple states. Since its founding in 2016, the Fairness Project has won over 30 ballot measure campaigns to advance economic and social justice in 17 states, including passing Medicaid expansion in seven states and raising the minimum wage in nine.
LISTEN: This group gets left-leaning policies passed in red states. How? Ballot measures
“The Fairness Project is the brainchild of a large health care workers’ union in California. It helps fund ballot measures for traditionally left-of-center issues and it provides extensive research into what messages will sway the largest number of voters. [Executive Director Kelly] Hall says, for example, to make a Trump voter feel good about expanding Medicaid coverage: ‘Folks who can separate this issue from their partisan identity are the people who get us over the finish line in these conservative states.’
“And they’ve won a lot. With the Fairness Project’s support, campaigns to raise the minimum wage and expand Medicaid have won not just in Missouri, but in nine red or purple states. Now they’re taking on abortion rights .The group also worked on a ballot measure in Michigan last year which codified access to reproductive health care, including abortion. They’re exploring more of these measures for 2024.”
Last year, the Fairness Project won eight ballot measure campaigns: defending reproductive rights in Michigan and Vermont; raising the minimum wage to $15 in Nebraska; expanding Medicaid to 40,000 low-income South Dakotans; reining in predatory medical debt collectors in Arizona; increasing civilian oversight of the Los Angeles County Sheriff; and defending direct democracy in Arkansas and South Dakota. Since 2016 the Fairness Project has won a total of 31 campaigns in 17 states across the country.
Continue reading and listening on NPR here.
IS YOUR STATE NEXT FOR THIS IMPORTANT WORK?
EDITORS NOTE: See the Resource Library on womensvoicesmedia.org. It provides information and help on this and many other issues, concerns, and interests by, for and about women.