File that under “Things you won’t hear” on Tuesday, April 12, the date that symbolizes how far into the year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year.
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According to White House statistics, women can only expect to make roughly 79% of what a man will – or 79 cents for every dollar. An earlier celebration was held on November 9, 2015, symbolically showing that if women were earning the same as men, they would not be paid for the last two months of the year. In 1996, the National Committee on Pay Equity established Equal Pay Day to bring awareness to the fact that no matter what the law says, women are still being underpaid as compared to men.
As women fight what has been an uphill battle for equal pay, they continue to face another exacerbating factor: being penalized for the fact that they could – regardless of whether they will – have children, NBC News reports. The court stated that the employer’s pay structure was “so inherently fraught with the risk-indeed, here, the virtual certainty-that it will perpetuate a discriminatory wage disparity between men and women that it can not stand, even if motivated by a legitimate non-discriminatory business goal”.
The gender pay gap is bigger or smaller depending on which state you call home. This is mainly due to employers that perpetuate wage inequities by anchoring women to their prior salaries.
Census data shows African-American women here earn 48 cents to the male dollar, and Hispanic women receive 51 cents, comparably.
It symbolically marks how long into the new year full-time working women need to work until their earnings can catch up to what full-time working men earned the year before. The Dutch Equal Pay Day is March 4 and the Belgian Equal Pay Day is March 13.
“There is not a one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges women face”, the report reads, “and these well intentioned government efforts may help some, but they will backfire on many more by making our workplaces less flexible and discouraging job creation”.
“Today, for every $1 earned by men, our female employees in the USA earn 99.8 cents at the same job title and level”. Still, that doesn’t account for the almost immediate gap that begins even for those getting their first post-graduation jobs.
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There are some occupations – such as social worker – in which women actually get paid more on average than their male colleagues. One, for instance, found that men were willing to apply for jobs and promotions when they felt they met 60 percent of the requirements, while women tended to apply only when they felt they met 100 percent the requirements. “And I think many of us thought it would kind of work itself out but it has been very persistent over the years”.
