From the NCPE / Equal Pay Day Site
Today, April 20, will be noted variously as Hitler’s birthday, the anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting in the U.S., and an excuse to get totally stoned (huh huh huh, 4-20, geddit?). More importantly, it’s also Equal Pay Day, which has been marked annually since 1996, when the National Committee on Pay Equity decided that the pay gap between men and women needed more attention.
In the States, April 15 is when our state and federal taxes come due, and there is seemingly endless pissing and moaning about how the government is robbing us blind (and here’s a game: Count the Rape Analogies!), but I’ve yet to hear from any of these said piss-and-moaners that due to wage disparities, on average, women have to work 23% longer than do men to earn the same amount, without a 23% decrease in their tax burden. (And again, this is average; many women of color are even more disadvantaged by pay discrepancies.)
Hitler, murder, and weed are perhaps not the best associations for this cause, so why choose April 20? April was selected for its association with taxation and financial matters, and a Tuesday was selected to represent how far into the work week women must work to earn what men earned the previous week. (Seeing it on that scale really makes me mad, for some reason.)
So, what can you do to help out on Equal Pay Day? Well, first of all, arm yourself with knowledge about the pay gap. You can do that here, where there are lots of links and resources. You can share your knowledge with other women, perhaps by starting a WAGE (Women Are Getting Even) club, to create channels for knowledge and to support women advocating for themselves with their elected officials and their employers. If you’re in a position of power in your business, you can lead the way by auditing your company’s policies and pay rates to see if (IF?) there are significant inequities. You can share your knowledge with your colleagues, your friends and families, and you can put the lie to the notions that “men are rightfully paid more because”:
- they’re better educated
- they work more dangerous or more difficult jobs
- they have families to support
- they blah blah blah garbage lying crap
The Equal Pay Day Kit has a lot of examples and templates and useful tools. It’s probably a bit late to call a press conference, but that’s no excuse to let the day pass you by. Put it on the calendar for next year, and get started now!
Thanks for the post, PhD. As a woman approaching the work force, this is an important and worrying issue for me.
The one example of this that got me was the following: the natural sciences have historically been highly-paid careers. When women started getting access to science through higher education, more women went into biology than any other scientific field, for whatever reason. From that point on, the wages that biologists are paid stagnated compared to the other sciences, even as biotech grows in size and importance as a field. For me, this puts the lie to the idea that the only problem is women choosing lower-paying careers. When a woman chooses a career, it *becomes* lower-paying.
If you’re in a position of power in your business, you can lead the way by auditing your company’s policies and pay rates to see if (IF?) there are significant inequities. You can share your knowledge with your colleagues, your friends and families
I’m a big fan of this. Salaries are rarely protected by non-disclosure agreements, and while companies openly discourage people from discussing what they’re paid, there’s almost never an actual legal bar to discussing or asking about salaries. Women should talk openly and frequently about what they’re paid, what they know about others’ salaries, and do some investigation about what’s standard in their business. I like http://www.glassdoor.com for research of this kind.
And…uh…I’m kinda sheltered and all. Can someone tell me what 4-20 is and save me a trip to Google? Thx.
Becky: 420.
Thank you! Judging from that link, it would appear that everyone on earth knows this but me.
I think something like what baraqiel is describing is happening with the rabbinate. I don’t know for sure about pay scales, but I do know that as numbers of women in yeshiva increase, the status of rabbis is changing. It’s not so much that it’s a lower status as that the aura surrounding the position is less. There’s no winning.
@mischiefmanager: That’s certainly what’s happened in the mainline Protestant denominations. The majority of Methodist, Presbyterian and Episcopal seminarians are now women, and compared to previous generations, Protestant clergy is less of an authority job and more of a social work kind of job. But you could also make the argument that the reason that the clergy opened to women in the first place is that it was already undergoing a fundamental status change that made the previously unthinkable seem less threatening.
That doesn’t bother me much, though. I don’t like the authoritarian approach to religion, and I wouldn’t want women clergy to be remote, rigid or autocratic, as male clergy have traditionally been. The less of that the better, no matter who’s in the pulpit.
baraqiel, we ruined the humanities in the 70s.
@PhD – Maybe that’s the way to eliminate the wage gap: ruin every field we possibly can.
On that note, for that porn paper I’m doing, I found a quote by some male porn star saying that fucking people on camera was the ultimate expression of masculinity because it was “the last” thing that women couldn’t do and had to approximate.
A few years ago I got the FML at Penn State to combine the two significances of the date by having a Wage Gap Bake Sale – baked goods sold to women for 75cents and men for a dollar. This is not allowed on campus because it’s discriminatory. The next year we had it outside of Sam’s Club – until the manager read our literature and kicked us off the property. Good times.
@AmBam: That is BRILLIANT.
What a sad excuse for a human. Not because he does porn (whatever), but why he does it. I Fuck, Therefore I Am Man.
And I am all for ruining every possible field with girl cooties.