Tuesday, April 8th is
Equal Pay Day – the calendar date that marks the approximate extra time the
average American woman would need to earn as much as the average man did in the
prior year. According to the federal government, women make an average of 77
cents for every dollar that men earn. Women,
think about everything that has happened in your life from January 1st
through April 8th. You’ve
lived many a storied day, I’m sure. Now,
get your head around the fact that if you were being paid as much as men in
your field, you’ve effectively been working for free these last 98 days. Sobering thought, no?
How do these pay discrepancies
happen? Because most people don’t know
what other people make. There is a big
giant cloud of secrecy regarding wages that allows employers to vary employee
pay for any number of reasons, including discriminatory ones.
Enter the Obama administration. Tomorrow, on Equal Pay Day, the president
will put forth two new executive actions aimed at reducing or eliminating pay
discrimination. The first, an executive
order, will prohibit federal contractors from retaliating against employees who
talk about how much money they make. The
second action, a memorandum, will require federal contractors to report data to
the government showing the compensation provide their employees by sex and
race.
The effects of these
actions? Transparency. We can only fight battles we know about. And, granted, these actions only affect the
approximate 1 in 5 women who work for government contractors, but are
significant in that they will hopefully establish transparency among all
industries and professions. These
actions don’t require listing of employee wages or true confessions during
lunch meetings, but they will do away with being punished for seeking such
information, and they encourage healthy comparisons.
I applaud this important step
toward wage equality. Once we can see
that women in the same positions as men get paid the same wages, we can move
onto to other, more slippery, realms of wage inequality, like those that
financially favor occupations deemed “male” (Math/Science professor) over very
similar occupations deemed “female” (Humanities professor). But that’s another blog for another day, yes?
