Equal pay day statistics12/26/2023 Pay transparency is also becoming more common, with one in four Americans living in places where employers are required to share pay ranges. It is a step towards ensuring that we have workplaces that treat childbearing and childrearing as a matter of course and work around it, rather than still acting like it is some strange deviation from the norm.” “While that's not going to end the wage gap tomorrow, it is part of ensuring that the moment of having a child isn't a moment where you're being forced out of work altogether, with the immediate and long-term consequences for your paycheck. “What that does is it says employers have to make accommodations for pregnancy just like they do for disability,” says Martin. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act recently passed. Workplaces can lead the way in closing the gender wage gap while we’re waiting for policies and legislation to catch up, but there are a few policies being made that are a step in the right direction. “So employers have some interest in ensuring that they are doing what they can to make it worth their women's while to commit to them as an employer.”Ĭlosing the wage gap calls for a multipronged approach, from offering affordable childcare to paid family and medical leave to fair scheduling practices. “It is also the case that if you are underpaying women, you may not be attracting half of the really qualified and talented potential employees out there,” says Martin. At our current rate of progress, it will take 132 years for the world to close the overall economic gender gap, but doing so could help boost the world’s economy by $7 trillion.Ĭlosing the wage gap also benefits workplaces. “The math is such that if we don't close the gender wage gap, every year women and all of the families who depend on women are falling further and further behind,” says Martin.Īpart from the wage gap robbing women of lifetime earnings that impacts their Social Security payments and retirement, not paying women fairly also impacts their children and families, as nearly two-thirds of women are their family’s primary breadwinner. For Latinas, Native and Black women, the lifetime losses translate to about $1 million or more, meaning many women of color would have to work to 80 or 90 years old-beyond their life expectancies-to ever catch up. The cost of women, on average, earning 84 cents on the dollar to what a man makes adds up to a loss of nearly $400,000 over the course of a 40-year career. “Dozens of studies show that when you control for all the factors that should be relevant to the wage gap, such as occupation, education, experience level, and hours worked, we still see consistent wage gaps where men are being paid more than women.” In fact, a gender and racial wage gap persists in 94% of occupations. “The wage gap is a useful measure because so many sources of inequality show up in that number-from paying someone less for the same job to the disproportionate impacts of caregiving to the fact that the occupations where women are overrepresented tend to be paid less simply because we undervalue women's work, full stop,” says Emily Martin, VP for education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |