In 1963, working women earned less than 60 cents for every dollar earned by a man.
Wage discrimination is not over in this country and as the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act approaches, two pieces of Congressional legislation and a constitutional amendment have only managed to close the gap to 77 cents.
African-American women earn 62 cents and Hispanic women earn 54 cents. It’s a gaping hole in our society that stretches across all fields and college majors.
The Paycheck Fairness Act to End Wage Discrimination is an important step towards repairing the damage done to the Equal Pay Act by courts over the years. The PFA would prohibit employers from firing employees who discuss their salaries or reduce other employees’ wages to achieve pay equity.
One of the major obstacles to ending wage discrimination has always been that many women don’t know they’re being paid less than their male counterparts. It’s legal for employers to fire employees who discuss their salaries with each other, and many women feel unable to act or have no suspicions at all.
But here’s the thing; 77 cents amounts to an annual discrepancy of about $10,000. Women are now the primary or co-wage earners in 60 percent of American households, which means the wage discrepancy negatively affects total spending and our GDP as well.
Legislation will never be enough to eliminate the systematic cultural biases towards women in our society, but it’s an important first step. We need to stop pretending feminism is no longer relevant and we live in an equitable society, because we don’t. We’ve normalized our biases against women through thousands of years of carefully structured societies, and the only way forward is through education and cultural analysis. Both women and men are guilty of discrimination against women, and it is impossible for progress without a certain amount of unity amongst the fairer sex.
As Gloria Steinem once said, “No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.” The same can be said of any woman.
