Congratulations, average woman of America! Today, April 9, 2013, it is Equal Pay Day: you have caught up to what your male counterpart earned in 2012. Bask in it for a while before you start thinking about when you'll catch up to what he's making in 2013.
Overall, women make 77 cents on the man's dollar, but it's not uniform: Asian women earn 87.6 cents to the white man's dollar, while black women earn just 64 cents compared with white men. And while people trying to claim discrimination isn't a reason for pay disparities often point to time off from paid work women take to raise children, consider this:
The typical never-married woman with no children working full time, year round is paid 72.9 percent of what a man working full time, year round is paid.
Or consider that the pay gap
starts right at the beginning of people's work lives. Among college graduates aged 21-24, women make 12.2 percent less than men, according to one study, while
according to another, the gap is five percent right out of college but grows to 12 percent after 10 years, even for women who have continued working as steadily as men. Bottom line?
More than 40 percent of the wage gap cannot be explained by occupation, work experience, race, or union membership. More than one-quarter of the wage gap is due to the different jobs that men and women hold, and about 10 percent is due to the fact that women are more likely to leave the workforce to provide unpaid care to family members. But even when controlling for gender and racial differences, 41 percent is “unexplainable by measureable factors.”
These statistics are just a few of the reasons we need stronger laws to close the gender pay gap.
Tell Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act so women can take the next step toward pay parity.