Wage Gap

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 »

Tomorrow, April 17, 2012, is both Equal Pay Day and Tax Day—which means it’s a very good day to focus on economic fairness and what achieving it would mean for women.

First, fairness also requires closing the pay gap. Almost fifty years after passage of the Equal Pay Act, the typical woman working fulltime, year-round continues to be paid only 77 cents for every dollar paid by her male counterpart—a loss of close to $11,000 a year at the median.To catch up with the wages her male equivalent had been paid by December 31 of last year, this typical woman had to work through April 17. Even after taking into account factors such as occupation, education, and hours worked, women still consistently earn less than men, and this pay gap translates into lower unemployment benefits when women lose their jobs, lower Social Security benefits when they retire, and less ability to meet their families’ needs.

Because more and more families depend in whole or in part on a woman’s earnings, the pay gap doesn’t just shortchange women. It shortchanges everyone. Yet the pay gap persists, in part because pay discrimination is hard to identify and hard to challenge. Read more »

 Are we living in 2012 or 1950? I pondered that thought a lot while reading some of the stories in this week’s roundup. Today we have some stories on a pregnancy-based firing in Texas, a Wisconsin legislator’s explanation of the wage gap, and more.

First up, in ridiculous news: a teacher in the Dallas, TX was fired for her out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

Welcome back to 1950!

Cathy Samford – a science teacher and the volleyball coach at Heritage Christian Academy – was fired last fall after disclosing her pregnancy to the Christian school she worked for. She and her fiancé, her baby’s father, had been planning on getting married later this year.

School headmaster Dr. Ron Taylor defends firing Samford, explaining the Heritage Christian Academy “expects their teachers to be ministers as well as educators,” and went on to add that “It's not that she's pregnant. The issue here is being an unmarried mother.” Read more »

Ah, April. That time of year when spring finally arrives and the wage paid to the typical female worker finally catches up to what the typical man was paid the previous year.

Let’s be real: unlike nicer weather and other hallmarks of spring, the wage gap pretty much, well, sucks. And while spring comes and goes, the wage gap has been with us forever, and has only closed by 16 cents since 1960. At that rate, the wage gap will take about eighty more years to close.

Every year we rally around a day that’s been stuck in April for some time now to “celebrate” women’s earnings catching up to men’s. This year, Equal Pay Day falls on April 17.

But really, there’s not much to celebrate. And that’s doubly true for women of color, whose Equal Pay Day falls even later in the year.

As one of NWLC’s online people, I’ve been helping put together some online equal pay efforts to drum up support for the need to close the wage gap. And in addition to our annual Blog for Equal Pay Day blog carnival (which you can still sign up to participate in, if you’re a blogger!) we’re trying a new medium this year: Twitter. Read more »

We’re gearing up for another blog carnival that’s just around the corner – our annual Blog for Equal Pay Day! We’ll be partnering with MomsRising this year to spread the message far and wide, but to do that we need some help from you!

If you’re a blogger, we’d like for you to join us in writing a blog post (or more, if you’re so inspired!) discussing equal pay and the wage gap. Today, women make just 77 cents for every dollar a man makes — that's an average of $10,622 in lost wages every year. For many women and their families, ending the wage gap would buy a year's supply of groceries, three months of child care, or six months of health insurance. It's time to stop discounting women's voices and paychecks.

HERE’S WHAT YOU CAN DO: Participate in our blog carnival by submitting a blog post! Focus your blog post on policy analysis, personal experiences, reports, graphs and more – the choice is up to you. Here are some ideas to get you thinking about your blog post:

• Interview your grandmother or other older relatives about their struggle to earn equal pay for equal work.  You can also write about your own struggle.
  
• If you earn minimum wage (or used to make minimum wage), tell us what it would mean for your family if the minimum wage or tipped minimum wage was increased.
  
• Share your hopes about equal pay for the future; or tell us what kinds of policy you’d like advanced on this issue.
  
• Write a letter to your daughter, granddaughter or any other younger women in your life about the importance of fighting for equal pay for equal work.

Both NWLC and MomsRising will collect and publish the blog posts into one spectacular blog carnival, and we’ll keep the carnival going on Facebook and on Twitter with the hashtag #fairpay.

Want more info on how to participate? See our full participation guide – including how and when to submit your post – after the jump. Still have questions? Just shoot them to me in an email at djackson@nwlc.org!

Read more »

On Tuesday from 1-2pm ET NWLC’s Vice President of Family Economic Security Joan Entmacher and I will be live chatting with The Nation’s Bryce Covert about what obstacles women still face in the economy. We’ll be talking about women dropping out of the labor force, being left behind in the recovery, receiving unfair pay, and other topics. Join us and bring your questions!

A few facts to get you thinking:

1. Did you know that while women suffered 30 percent of the job loss during the recession, they’ve accounted less than 12 percent of the job growth in the recovery?

For the last decade, the wage gap for women has barely budged – the typical women who works full time, year round still only makes 77 cents for every dollar paid to her male counterpart. As highlighted by a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article, there is a gender wage gap in virtually all jobs. Out of 265 major occupations, women’s median salary only exceeded men’s in one – personal care workers. The wage gap also occurs at all education levels, after experience is taken into account, and it gets worse as women’s careers progress. All told, even when accounting for a number of factors that can be expected to impact wages, it still exists. In fact, recent research shows that more than 40 percent of the wage gap is still unexplained, even after considering educational background, occupation, industry, work experience, union status, and race.

Despite this evidence of persistent unfair pay, recent weeks have also seen two oddly optimistic articles about women’s earnings. Let’s see what they’re so excited about:

First, Anya Kamenetz tries to reconcile why women’s earnings haven’t increased while their levels of education have. She concludes that women’s earnings are falling behind because (1) they have kids, (2) they chose jobs that don’t pay well, and (3) they are not “bold” or assertive. The onus in her explanation falls for the most part on women themselves – though she notes the structural element of some of these pieces, her answer is largely about planning correctly and making different choices. Who knew it was so easy – women can just make different choices and they’ll be paid fairly! This answer ignores the fact that even women who aren’t mothers see a wage gap. It ignores the fact that “women’s” jobs pay less precisely because women chose them – because women’s work is devalued – and, as noted above, that women are paid less even when they do chose the same profession as men. It ignores the fact that women often get punished for being bold or assertive. And the idea that these women might face discrimination? Not even mentioned. Read more »

It’s a proven fact that the mere presence of babies can turn normal, functioning adults into blabbering idiots who suddenly feel the need to gesticulate wildly and constantly shift voice intonation while describing something as simple as “that big doggy over there!” But new research suggests that exactly what we blabber may be influenced by the sex of the young child we’re blabbering at – details that could have a long-term impact on child development.

In a new study at the University of Delaware, researchers found that parents talk about “number concepts” twice as much to male toddlers as to female toddlers. According to the study: “For cardinal-numbers speech, in which a number is attached to an obvious noun reference — ‘Here are five raisins’ or ‘Look at those two beds’ — the difference was even larger. Mothers were three times more likely to use such formulations while talking to boys.”

The study was based on observations of parents speaking to their children aged between 22 and 27 months, meaning that girls may be exposed to less math than are boys before they are even able to count to “ten” – imagine the size of the gap that exists by the time they are eighteen and signing up for Calculus! Read more »