April 10 is Equal Pay Day
Women’s pay now equals what men got in 2017.
Equal Pay Day arrives Tuesday, marking the day on the calendar when the average woman’s earnings finally catch-up to what a male peer earned in 2017.
It took three more months and 10 days.
The notion of bringing home 80 cents for every dollar pocketed by a man on a national basis is unsettling enough. But it’s even more startling when those lost wages are added up.
Overall, it amounts to $10,000 in lost wages a year, says Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families.
That chunk of cash could pay for 14 more months of child care, 74 more weeks of groceries and an additional
10 months of rent for the average woman.
For women of color, the losses go much deeper. Black women, who earn
63 cents for every dollar earned by a white man, see a loss of more than
$21,000 a year, says Noreen Farrell, executive director of the organization Equal Rights Advocates.
Native American women, earning
59 cents on the dollar, experience a shortfall of $24,000. Latinas, who bring home 54 cents on the dollar, endure a $26,000 annual shortfall, and Asian women, with pay averaging 87 cents on the dollar, have a loss of more than $7,000.
The earnings gap is narrower in some parts of the U.S. But “there are wage disparities in every state, every sector and virtually every occupation,’’ says Deborah Vagins, senior vice president of public policy and research for the American Association of Uni- versity Women.
New York had the slimmest gap, with the median annual pay for a woman working full-time amounting to 89% of that earned by a man — or $47,358 as compared to $53,124. California was close behind, with women earning 88 cents for every dollar earned by a male peer, or $45,489 as compared to $51,417.
The distance between what women and men make on average was greatest in Louisiana and Utah. Women in Louisiana brought home $34,793 while men made $50,031. Meanwhile, female workers in Utah earned a median income of $36,022, while men brought home $51,099.
There has been change. So far this year, 38 states have introduced gender pay-equity bills. The AAUW launched an initiative to instruct 10 million women on how to negotiate their salaries by 2022.
“There are lots of levers to make change ... so I remain optimistic,’’ Vagins says.
“The progress has been slow, but we’re going to keep at it and our goal is to make Equal Pay Day obsolete.’’