Equal Pay

It's Equal Pay Day -- the day in the year when women's wages finally catch up to men's from the previous year. For the occasion, NWLC has released a number of new fact sheets explaining the persistent wage gap and its impact on women and families. You'll see that today women still make $.77 for every dollar the typical man makes. There are lots of reasons we need to close the wage gap. Among the most important: it's just not right. It's hard to say it better than Donna Summer in She Works Hard for the Money.

Summer wrote this song about Onetta, a bathroom attendant she met at a restaurant who worked for "little money, just tips for pay." Like Onetta, millions of women are still clustered in low-wage jobs working hard for little pay, with women making up nearly 2/3 of workers paid the minimum wage. Fair pay would make a world of difference to these women and their families. Read more »

As a twenty-something woman with student loan debt, I think about money A LOT.  So do my friends. It’s not uncommon for one of us to ask if we can hang out at someone’s house rather than at a happy hour to save money. It used to be that when we got together, sharing tips for saving and sympathizing about financial struggles were common topics of conversation, but talking about our pay was not. That is, until one day when we decided to set discomfort aside and put numbers on the table. It turned out that one of my friends was being paid significantly less than those of us with similar job responsibilities.  That discussion gave her the information – and motivation – that she needed to successfully ask for and get a raise. 

While this conversation between friends was a little uncomfortable, talking about pay can lead to much more than discomfort for many workers: it can result in discipline or even termination.  More than 60% of private sector-employees report that discussing their pay is prohibited or discouraged by their employers.

When employees can’t talk to their coworkers about what they are making, they have no way of knowing if they are being paid less. The Paycheck Fairness Act will ensure that employees can discuss pay without fear of retaliation. Read more »

Oh, glorious spring! The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and all of the metaphorical references to the significance of the season begin again. It’s time to renew, revive, recharge! Unfortunately, federal efforts to collect employee compensation data more closely resemble a tree in winter: frozen and dormant; its fruit trapped in its branches.

A coalition of advocates for equal pay recently sent a letter to President Obama highlighting the problem:

[T]here currently is no mechanism for federal enforcement agencies to detect widespread wage discrimination, even when it occurs in our nation’s largest employers.

If alarm bells aren’t going off inside your brain right now, here’s why they should be:

1. 50 years after the Equal Pay Act became law, women are still paid 77 cents for every dollar paid to a man; yet, the government does not have the basic information it needs to enforce this law;
2.  The Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (“OFCCP”) and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) already collect data to aid in the enforcement of other civil rights laws but still do not collect information about pay; and
3. The vast majority of Americans support federal actions that give women more tools to get fair pay in the workplace.

Last year I had the pleasure of meeting AnnMarie Duchon. She testified before the House Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee that after learning she was being paid unfairly she was able to confirm the information with her coworkers and negotiate with her boss for a salary increase. Pretty impressive, right?

But unfortunately, the conversations had by AnnMarie would be banned in a lot of workplaces. In fact, a 2010 IWPR poll found that around half of private sector workers believe that they cannot share their salaries.

Policies and practices that keep women in the dark about pay disparities diminish their ability to enforce their rights to fair pay and allow unfair pay practices to flourish. My best evidence? Lilly Ledbetter. Goodyear, a federal contractor, had one of these insane punitive pay secrecy policies and Lilly Ledbetter worked there almost 20 years before learning that she was being paid less than her male coworkers. In case you’re counting, the money she lost not only hurt her ability to pay for basics like groceries and utilities, she is still losing money to this day because the discriminatory pay is reflected in her retirement. Read more »

Cross-posted from Policy Mic.

April 9 is Equal Pay Day, representing the date in 2013 through which women must work to match what men earned in 2012, thanks to the persistent gap between men’s and women’s median earnings. Women working full time, year round in the United States are paid just 77 cents for every dollar paid to their male counterparts, and the gap is even wider for women of color; black women working full time, year round are paid only 64 cents, and Hispanic women only 55 cents, for every dollar paid to their white, non-Hispanic male counterparts.

There are a number of steps the federal government can take to help close the wage gap and promote fair pay for women, like preventing and remedying pay and other discrimination (by, for example, passing the Paycheck Fairness Act) and expanding women’s access to growing, high-paying jobs that are nontraditional for their gender. And here’s another important measure to add to that list: raising the minimum wage.

Women are nearly two thirds of minimum wage earners in the United States today and represent a large majority in most of the ten largest low-paying occupations. Women’s concentration in such low-wage jobs is one of the reasons women still typically earn less than men. A woman working full time at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour makes just $14,500 in a year – thousands of dollars below the poverty line for a mom with two kids. Pay for tipped workers – like restaurant servers, who are about 70 percent women – can be even lower: the federal tipped minimum cash wage has been frozen at just $2.13 per hour for more than 20 years. Read more »

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you probably know that the wage gap in the U.S. hasn’t budged in the last decade, and that women still get paid 77 cents, on average, for every dollar paid to a man. One southwestern state is taking the lead on closing this gap. New Mexico – the Land of Enchantment – is the home of the yucca flower, the black bear, thriving Hispanic culture, and now groundbreaking fair pay legislation!

In New Mexico, women typically make only 79 cents for every dollar a man makes. African American and Hispanic women do considerably worse: at 60 cents and 53 cents, respectively. In an effort to close this gap, Governor Susana Martinez of New Mexico signed the Fair Pay for Women Act into law on March 16, 2013. Read more »

To mark Equal Pay Day, NWLC's Fatima Goss Graves, Vice President for Education and Employment, and Becka Wall, Program Assistant for Communications sat down for a chat on the success we've had on equal pay – and what we need to do next.

Becka: Hi, Fatima! Thanks so much for sitting and chatting with me about Equal Pay. I feel like this has been such a long and uphill battle. Where does the fight for equal pay stand right now?

Fatima: Since we passed the Equal Pay Act, the wage gap has narrowed by 18 cents. And there has been some clear progress – no longer will you see separate gender-based pay classifications, for example. But the wage gap has not budged for a decade, so there is serious work to do.

Fifty years since the passing of the Equal Pay Act is a great time to look at where we are – assess how far we’ve come, and how far we have to go.

Becka: What are some of the major causes that contribute to the issue of unequal pay?

Fatima: Women are still paid less for the same job, and it’s impossible in some spaces to get salary information. Some workplaces actual ban women from talking about their own wages. Women are concentrated in occupations that pay less. There are also a number of barriers to higher, paid traditionally male jobs. And there is a continuing penalty for caregivers – studies have shown that women who are mothers are paid less than men who are fathers. Read more »

Today is Equal Pay Day! These days, women still make just 77 cents for every dollar a man makes, adding up to nearly $11,000 in lost wages every year. So this year we asked bloggers to answer the question, “What would you do with your $11,000 in lost wages?”

After the jump, you’ll find links to blog posts from NWLC staff members and from our participants. Keep checking back here for the latest posts!

p.s. Are you on Twitter? Join us at 1:00pm ET for a tweetchat on equal pay and the wage gap. Our official chat hashtag is #TalkPay, and we’ll be joined by Lilly Ledbetter and other special guests! Read more »

April 9 is Equal Pay Day –the day more than three months into the year when women’s wages finally catch up to what men were paid in the previous year. In “honor” of the occasion National Women’s Law Center is releasing fresh data and analysis on the persistent wage gap between men and women.

This is also a big birthday year – something actually worth celebrating – the Equal Pay Act turns 50 in June! But on the eve of that happy occasion, here’s another downer: As reported in The Wage Gap by State for Women Overall, 50 years in, the wage gap is still going strong all across the U.S.

Since 1963, when the Equal Pay Act became law, we’ve narrowed the wage gap by only 18 cents, and in the last ten years that gap hasn’t closed at all. For the last decade, the median annual earnings of women have lagged behind men – women working full time, year round have made roughly 77 cents for every dollar made by men working full time, year round. We’ve still got a whopping 23 cents to go before we close the wage gap. Even if the wheels of progress were to start turning again today, if we only close the gap another 18 cents in the next 50 years, we’ve got 64 years before the wage gap closes. Read more »

Equal Pay Day is fast approaching, and this year NWLC is excited to gather people in a virtual space to talk about equal pay issues. If you’re on Twitter, we hope you’ll join us!

On Tuesday, April 9, 2013 NWLC will be hosting a tweetchat from 1:00 – 2:00 pm ET to talk about equal pay and the wage gap. Our official chat hashtag is #TalkPay. Read more »