Wage Gap

To flip an old phrase, the political is personal. And as a young woman in the beginning of my professional life, the Paycheck Fairness Act is very personal.

For those of you who don’t know, the Paycheck Fairness Act is a bill that would strengthen the Equal Pay Act by prohibiting employers from retaliating against employees for sharing information about their wages, improving data collection and enforcement by government agencies, closing loopholes that courts have opened in the law, and making it easier for employees to come together as a group to challenge discriminatory pay policies.

Apologies if that sounds wonky, but I promise you, these policy changes can have personal impact. Check out the wage gap in your home state (I hope you’ve had the chance to look at our beautiful state by state fact sheets on the wage gap). These female cents on the male dollar figures - 77 cents nationally, 76 cents in my home state of Illinois, 91 cents in Washington, DC - aren’t just arbitrary numbers. They translate into real money that never finds its way into your bank account simply because of your gender.

Did you know that a typical woman loses out on $431,000 in earnings over a forty-year period? That’s less money to pay back student loans, buy a house or car, send children to college, save for retirement, go on vacation, contribute to charity, or simply buy Ben and Jerry’s when it’s not on sale! Read more »

When I heard Alex Castellanos on “Meet the Press” contend that the wage gap is a myth a few weeks back, I choked on my green tea.

Data show that it persists across nearly all demographics and sectors of society. And equal pay for equal work seems like a non-partisan issue of fairness to me. But Castellanos wants to wave a wand and make those facts disappear.

Compared to my friends graduating this year, I feel pretty lucky that I have another two years before I enter the full-time job market. Bleak statistics on job placement for recent grads has me anxious about my future. Top that off with my soon-to-increase student loan rate (you’re welcome millionaires, enjoy your continued tax breaks) and my hope to continue my education beyond undergrad and my financial security is, well, nonexistent. Oh, and since I’m a woman, my new degree is very likely to earn me less than my male peers with the same degree starting year one, even though I’ve done everything right. Trust me, if I had a magic wand, I’d make the wage gap a thing of the past – but I don’t, and I’m worried. Read more »

There are currently two major pieces of legislation in Congress that would help close the wage gap. One is the Paycheck Fairness Act (PFA), which is scheduled for a vote soon. The PFA would strengthen current laws against wage discrimination by protecting employees who voluntarily share pay information with colleagues from retaliation, fully compensating victims of sex-based pay discrimination, empowering women and girls by strengthening their negotiation skills, and holding employers more accountable under the Equal Pay Act. The other is one that you might not think of: the Rebuild America Act, which would raise the federal minimum wage from just $7.25 per hour to $9.80 per hour, giving a raise to millions of women workers.

Each year, millions of workers struggle to make ends meet on minimum wage earnings. Roughly two-thirds of these workers are women. They provide care for children and elders, clean homes and offices, and wait tables. Read more »

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. 

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.

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 »