Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst

This blog post is a part of NWLC’s Mother’s Day 2012 blog series. For all our Mother’s Day posts, please click here.

I spend a lot of time working with and thinking about the statistics of poverty – I think it is a valuable job and I love it. But poverty is more than statistics. Poverty is a personal issue and it is especially personal for me.

When my mom was a child, growing up in New England in the 1950s, she was poor. What did being poor mean for my mom? It meant that her family didn’t have enough to eat – sometimes they would divide up a head of lettuce and call it dinner. It meant that she and her three brothers had to decide who got to go to school on which day because there wasn’t enough money for everyone to have shoes – and if it was your day to be barefoot, you had to stay home.

When I think about my mom’s childhood, it pains me to think about all of the safety net programs we have now that her family could have benefitted from but didn’t have access to.

77 cents.

That’s what the typical woman working full time, year round makes for every dollar paid to her male counterpart.

Just a few weeks ago, we “celebrated” Equal Pay Day – the day that represents how much longer the typical woman working full time, year round would have to work to be paid as much as the comparable man makes in one year. For the typical woman who makes just short of $37,000 a year, that means working three and a half months longer.

Three and a half months is a lot of extra work. Sadly, it used to be even longer.  In 1963, the year the Equal Pay Act was passed, the typical woman working full time, year round made 59 cents for every dollar paid to her male counterpart. By 1973, the wage gap reached its widest point since the Census Bureau began tracking earnings – the typical woman working full time, year round made less than 57 cents for every dollar made by her male counterpart. Now we’ve been stuck at 77 cents for about a decade. So while the wage gap has shrunk since the Equal Pay Act became law in 1963, it hasn’t come anywhere close to disappearing.