EPD

April 12th marks Equal Pay Day—a day women have celebrated never. This date is symbolic of the amount of time it takes women’s pay to catch up with their male counterpart’s salary from the year before—even decades after the Equal Pay Act was signed into law by President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Today, before declaring the construction of a new national monument at a historic location in Washington, D.C., to honor the movement for women’s equality, President Obama said, “I want young girls and boys 100 years from now, to come here and be astonished there was ever a time when women earned less than men for doing the same work.”

Yet in the United States, women on average are paid just 79 cents for every dollar paid to men. The average woman would’ve had to work all of 2015, and into April of 2016, just to earn as much as the average man did in ALL of 2014 alone. And factors such as race makes the disparity between men’s and women’s pay even larger. The National Women’s Law Center says that the average American woman will earn about $430,000 less than a man over a 40-year career. For Black women the losses mount to $877,480 and for Latino females they stand at over $1 million.

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At this pace, pay equity between men and women won’t occur until 2059, and neither celebrities nor sports figures are exempt to this discrimination. Women currently represent nearly 40% of primary family breadwinners today yet are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetimes due to wage discrimination.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

  1. Support salary transparency. President Obama’s very first bill signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act aimed at fighting against wage discrimination and closing the gender wage gap by requiring companies with 100 or more employees to report their staff’s pay broken down by race, gender, and ethnicity to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
  2. ASK. The VP of Human Resources for CareerBuilder says that 49% of all job candidates—male and female—didn’t ask for a raise. Negotiation’s goal is to reach an agreement ideal to both parties. You are career planning and securing job growth and potential. Work is hard, you deserve to paid appropriately for it.
  3. Support the Paycheck Fairness Act. This proposed legislation would add procedural protections to the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Fair Labor Standards Act as part of an effort to address male–female income disparity in the United States. The Paycheck Fairness Act has been shot down and reintroduced many times, most recently into the United States Senate on April 1, 2014 by Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD)
  4. Don’t give up! Share, post, tweet your support for women, daughters, mothers and sisters to get equal pay NOW. Fight for your children and yourself. 2059 is too long to wait.ae458619be635911950f6a706700aeef

 

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