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Women are still effectively losing at least one out of every four
paychecks. The cost of the wage gap is felt first and foremost by
women themselves, but it doesn't stop there. Discriminatory wage
policies cut into family budgets and affect who can buy a home or
send a child to college. The pay gap for working women reaches deep
into family pockets; 62 percent make half or more than half the
family income.
We've waited long enough. It isn't right for almost half our work
force to be undervalued. It's also not smart economics or politics.
Women are doing their share; we've gotten more education and
filled the classes for doctors, lawyers and MBAs. But the gap
persists. Based on the median earnings for full-time year-round
workers, white male high school graduates earn on a par with black
and Hispanic women who are college graduates.
Women have met other tests the experts said were why we were paid
less.
First, more women are working in traditionally male occupations
-- but that doesn't help; the wage gaps there are even larger than
the average. Second, most women with children have not left the
labor force for family reasons; two-thirds of women with small
children are in the work force -- whether they want to be or not.
Still the pay gap persists.
Women, on average, have to beat some heavy odds to be paid like
men. There are only four jobs where women make slightly more than
men: special education teachers, order clerks, electrical and
electronic engineers, and miscellaneous food preparers.
Why is progress so difficult to make? Simply put, it is not a
priority.
Current decision-makers -- usually men -- are not concerned
enough to act. In every field, the higher up the ladder you go,
you'll find fewer and fewer women. Congress is still 86 percent
male, and 98 percent of the chief executive officers in Fortune 1000
firms are men.
We need different leadership, and that means more women. When
there are more women top managers, working women's salaries go up,
according to a recent study by Philip N. Cohen, a sociologist at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Half our work force has to work harder and longer to make ends meet.
That doesn't make sense, and it doesn't need to be the case. There
are some practical steps that can be taken to close the pay gap.
We need more leadership by women public officials to create policy
change.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rep. Rosa DeLauro have introduced
the Paycheck Fairness Act in the House and Senate, which will have
some ability to positively improve the wage gap issue. The initial
step must be to protect employees who can be, and are, punished for
comparing salaries (serving as a powerful damper on organizing for
equity); to require accurate employment data; and to vigorously
enforce the Equal Pay Act, passed in 1963, which requires that women
and men doing the same job are paid equally.
But there needs to be more grass-roots leadership to organize and
mobilize in local communities to determine what disparities exist
and press bosses for corrective action. Evelyn Murphy, author of
"Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men -- And What to Do
About It," is organizing groups of women -- now in 16 states and on
a number of campuses -- to share salary information, as a first step
to moving upward. This new group, Wage Project, has a
calculator on
its website,
www.wageproject.org, for women to see how much they lose in pay
over a lifetime due to the pay gap.
The 117 million working women and their families can't wait 50
more years for equal pay; that's what the current rate of progress
of a half-cent per year means. Instead, with women leaders at the
forefront, we must be smart: Women and men must be paid equally for
equal work.
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Linda Tarr-Whelan is a senior fellow at
Demos, a think tank, and
a former ambassador to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women.
She is writing a book on the difference that women's leadership
makes.
[Text from file received from
American Forum]
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