Equal Pay

I consider myself a fairly savvy salary negotiator; it’s a point of pride. But apparently, I may be undercutting myself without even knowing it. I just booted up the aptly named Gender Gap App, a game that has you guess whether a salary is the average listed for men or for women in a certain job category.

On top of being good at salary negotiation, I also fancy myself good at mindless cell phone games. You cannot beat my minesweeper score, I promise. But this little game got the better of me. I continually underestimated the average salary for each job category. Even after I saw the pattern, and tried to self-correct, I still thought that jobs paid less than they do.

Several years ago I read an article that said there is less pay disparity between men and women in our Nation’s capital. That article was one of the reasons that I’ve never left Washington—I always figured that over time, I would be better off staying put.

In 2005, I was hired to be the only IT person for a 50-person firm just a few blocks from the White House. They hadn’t had a full-time IT person before, so they said they were looking for a “help-desk” person. When a managing partner made me a formal job offer, the salary was lower than I thought it should be based on the work that needed to be done, but I didn’t really know how to express that without sounding ungrateful for the offer. I had absolutely no idea how to negotiate a job offer, or that you even could! I accepted, and had it in the back of my mind that this was going to be a great learning opportunity with a lot of responsibility, and that I would grow from the experience.

Little did I know! They didn’t need a help-desk person—they needed an entirely new network infrastructure and round-the-clock attention. It was a dynamic place to work, very busy, and when I asked them for more purchasing authority and the freedom to replace the entire network, they happily agreed. That first project was a success, and they gave me a great deal of leeway to take on more responsibility (and more work!). Read more »

On April 17, women’s earnings from 2011 and 2012 will finally match their male counterparts’ 2011 earnings. Yes, it takes women a little over 15 months to make the same income that it takes men to make in 12. How is it that in 2012, women are still only making 77 cents to a man’s dollar? We have been fighting for equality for so long! We have had success – like the Equal Pay Act and, more recently, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. But we still have a long way to go.

We have even further to go now that the Wisconsin legislature and the Governor of Wisconsin repealed the state’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act, which beefed up the penalties for pay discrimination and the relief available to victims. This means that if a woman in Wisconsin finds that she is being paid less than her male counterpart, she has fewer remedies and less relief available to her than she did before.  And given that pay discrimination is hard to identify and hard to challenge, that’s definitely a step in the wrong direction.

The Wisconsin Restaurant Association was among the supporters of the repeal, which is pretty unsettling to me. Currently the tipped minimum wage stands at $2.13/hour, where it’s been stuck since 1991. Women make up two-thirds of employees in tipped jobs. Read more »

Over the last two years, I’ve written an awful lot about the wage gap and fair pay. This year, in honor of Blog for Equal Pay Day I decided to change it up. Behold the results below the jump. Should You Care About the Wage Gap? A Simple Guide!

Maybe I have read Brown Bear Brown Bear a few to many times to my two-year-old daughter. But when I think about the fight for equal pay, this is what I see.

Senator Kennedy (D-MA) never giving up. Even when he was sick, very sick, he pressed forward to fight for equal pay. Before he passed away I had the honor of meeting him. When I shook his hands, they felt like my grandfather’s --- squishy and cloud-like. He is sorely missed, but his fighting spirit for equal pay and justice continues.

Today is Equal Pay Day and you might be wondering, "What exactly does Equal Pay Day mean anyway?"

Here's how it works. In 2010, the typical woman working full time, year round was paid $36,931. That same year, the typical man working full time, year round was paid $47,715. That's a pay gap of $10,784. Equal Pay Day represents just how much longer the typical woman would have to work to make as much as the typical man. So it only took the typical man working full-time, year round one year to make $47,715. But the typical woman working full-time, year round — it took her until April 17th the next year to be paid the same amount of money. That's an extra three and a half months of work.

In preparation for Equal Pay Day, we've been crunching the numbers to figure out where different groups of women stand.

Want to know where women in your state stand? Check out our fact sheets for every state.

• The Best: Vermont, California, Nevada, New York, and Maryland were the states with the smallest wage gaps in 2010. The District of Columbia actually topped that list, where the typical woman working full time, year round was paid 91 cents for every dollar paid to the typical man.
• The Worst: Wyoming, Louisiana, and Utah were at the bottom of this list. In each of these states in 2010, the wage gap was over 30 percent. In Wyoming, the typical woman working full time, year round was paid just under 64 cents per dollar paid to her male counterpart.

Spring came early this year for those of us living on the East Coast. Here in Washington D.C., one of the world’s greatest displays of springtime—the Cherry Blossom trees—peaked early, with the blossoms gone weeks before the start of the annual festival that celebrates their fleeting beauty. Unfortunately for women across the country, not all springtime traditions came early this year. Equal Pay Day—the date when a typical woman's wages catch up to those of her male counterpart from the year before—remains stuck in late April. This year we mark Equal Pay Day on April 17th.

American women still earn, on average, only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men—a disparity that has budged a scant 18 cents in 50 years. The average gap in earnings translates to $10,784 a year in lost wages, a sum that could feed a typical family of four for a year and five months, pay an average mortgage and utilities for over ten months, or cover child care costs for a year and a half. And the numbers are even bleaker for women of color. For each dollar earned by the average white male, a black woman makes just 62.3 cents, and a Hispanic woman earns a meager 54 cents. Read more »

Many people think of fair pay as a women’s issue but it is a men’s issue as well.

In 2009, wives earned more than their husbands in more than one-third of all married couples.

Until recently were part of this one-third. We’ve been married for nearly three years and for about half that time I’ve been the breadwinner in our family, contributing more financially than Michael.

In the spring of 2010, I was offered my position at the National Women’s Law Center. Michael encouraged me to take it, even though it meant us moving to a DC where he didn’t have a full-time position. For our first year-and-a-half in D.C., he worked part-time as a Research Assistant for a professor at the University of Michigan while completing his dissertation. Read more »

Women Are Not WorthLess™

Ask President Obama to take action on Equal Pay Day.

Never discuss your salary with anyone.

That's what they told Lilly Ledbetter on her first day on the job in 1979. It wasn't until she found an anonymous note in her locker that Lilly realized that she was being paid as much as 40% less than her male colleagues in the same position.

This sort of pay secrecy policy that punishes employees helps to hide discriminatory pay practices. And here's the kicker: Lilly worked all those years for Goodyear Tire & Rubber, which had the privilege of being a federal contractor.

Today is Equal Pay Day — the day that a typical woman's wages finally catch up to a typical man's in 2011. Ask President Obama to ban federal contractors from retaliating against employees who talk about wages.

It took Lilly 20 years to find out that she was being paid less than her male co-workers. But we know that Lilly is not alone: nearly fifty years after President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, women working full time are paid just 77 cents on the dollar compared to their male counterparts. And the wage gap is far worse for women of color. Read more »

Today is Equal Pay Day! This year we’re co-hosting our annual Blog for Equal Pay Day blog carnival with MomsRising to get bloggers talking about the need to close the wage gap and secure equal pay for women.

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

Have a blog you’d like to submit to the blog carnival? Leave a link in the comments section on this post or email it to djackson@nwlc.org.

Read more »