Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
Excerpts from the July edition of the Harper’s Index:
- Percentage by which U.S. college enrollment is expected to decline this year: 15
- Average percentage by which a 2020 college graduate is projected to earn less in their first postgraduate year than a 2019 graduate: 20
- Percentage of white workers in the United States who can work from home: 30
- Percentage of African American workers who can: 20
- Of Latino workers: 16
- Portion of Americans who say they will still shake hands after COVID-19 has disappeared: 3/10
- Estimated number of unexpected pregnancies attributable to the COVID-19 crisis if lockdowns last through October: 7,000,000
- Percentage by which social isolation increases the mortality rate for men: 62
- For women: 75
- Number of state and local health-department jobs that have been eliminated since 2008 because of funding cuts: 56,360
- [Percentage of British adults] who want “everything to go back to how it was” when the lockdown is over: 1/10
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
QUOTATION
“It does no service to the cause of racial equality for white people to content themselves with judging themselves to be non-racist. Few people outside the Klan or skinhead movements own up to all-out racism these days. White people must take the extra step. They must become anti-racist.”
~~Clarence Page (1996)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2013—Women's pay gap looks better because men's average pay has gotten worse:
As my colleague Laura Clawson wrote earlier this week, 50 years after the Equal Pay Act, 97 percent of women working full-time still earn less than their male counterparts. A number of reasons have been offered for this, but one of them is still, half a century after corrective measures were taken, outright discrimination.
Another round of proof came last October in a study by the American Association of University Women, Graduating to a Pay Gap. It showed, just one year after they obtained their diplomas, college-educated women were on average already making $7,600 less each year than their male counterparts. And that wasn't because they were having babies or because they all chose fields that were less lucrative. The reason for the lower pay was simply because they were female.
Over the past three decades, there has been improvement, a narrowing of the gap. As Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute points out, the median hourly wage for women in 1979 was 62.7 of the median for men. In 2012, it was 82.8 percent:
However, a big chunk of that improvement—more than a quarter of it—happened because of men’s wage losses, rather than women’s wage gains.
With the exception of the period of labor market strength in the late 1990s, the median male wage, after adjusting for inflation, has decreased over essentially the entire period since the late 1970s. Between 1979 and 1996, it dropped 11.5 percent, from $19.53 per hour to $17.27 per hour. With the strong labor market of the late 1990s, the median male wage partially rebounded to $18.93 by 2002. It then began declining again; at $18.03 per hour in 2012, the real wage of the median male was 4.7 percent below where it had been a decade earlier.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Simpler times! Our 6/12/19 show! Greg Dworkin reaffirms Trump's terrible polling outlook. Paula Writer discusses a plan to win the impeachment fight. Chao steers DoT $ for hubby. Trump rakes in more emoluments. Russian trolling worse than reported.
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