Equal Pay Day

is a national concern as well as one at the university, according to Johnson.

“The university is committed to compensating staff and faculty fairly, and addresses pay equity in a number of ways,” he said.

One of those ways is through a recently implemented career roadmap, which offers staff a common career framework and pay structure and will allow the university to examine pay equity, Johnson said.

The Office of Academic Affairs also looks at faculty compensation and is developing best practices for finding gaps, he added.

Chen inspired Giusti personally to advocate for pay equity, which she does in part through membership on the President and Provost’s Council on Women.

“On a personal level, she motivated me to also try to take action and do my part to help in achieving salary equity,” Giusti said. “Seeing her realize she had an experience and a truth and (seeing) her data, (and) that her power was limited but still she was not going to shy away from telling her truth, that is empowering.” Chen’s was a unique situation when it comes to pay equity, Giusti said, as she was working part time and still experiencing a pay gap.

Her productivity was being measured as if she was a full-time employee, despite her part-time status and pay, Giusti said.

“It was like she was being penalized twice,” Giusti said. “She was being measured in some ways more harshly than her peers because of that choice she had made.”

Chen decided to go part time after having three children before seeking tenure and hoping for more work-life balance.

Part of the discrepancy in her pay was a motherhood pay gap, she said. Among full-time, year-round earners, mothers get paid 74 cents per $1 white men get, according to Equal Pay Today. Among all earners, mothers get paid 62 cents per $1 received by white men.

Equal Pay Day, which falls on March 14 this year, marks the gender pay gap in the United States by showing how far into the next year women must work to earn what men did, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Mom’s Equal Pay Day isn’t until Aug. 15, as it takes mothers even longer to catch up to men’s earnings.

“I felt like they wanted everyone to fit one model and that was the only model they could understand or value,” Chen said. “It was important to push back on that and say, ‘I am delivering, I’m doing all the things, just not in the way you want me to.’”

Looking back, Chen said she didn’t tell anyone about what she was going through because she felt people thought it was tacky that she would want more money.

Since then, she’s had an epiphany and realized that no one wants to talk about pay equity because everyone feels they are alone in the experience. She’s stopped feeling that way. “I’m not going to contribute to this anymore,” Chen said. “I’m going to let people know that this is what I went through, and I did get a 20% pay adjustment.”

Her advice to other women who would like to raise the issue is to bring numbers showing the disparities and be strategic about how comparisons are made and when the issue is raised.

“We just need that sunshine,” she said. “For us to see each other and recognize ‘Oh, this is also happening to all these other people. It’s not me, it’s not my fault. I didn’t do anything wrong.’” dking@dispatch.com @Danaeking