EQUAL PAY FOR MEN AND WOMEN PROFESSIONAL

Wage disparities kick in shortly after college graduation, when women and men should, absent discrimination, be on a level playing field. A study by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) examined how the wage gap affects college graduates.

EQUAL PAY FOR MEN AND WOMEN PROFESSIONAL

When The WAGE Project looked exclusively at full-time workers, they estimated that women with a high school diploma lose as much as $700,000 over a lifetime of work, women with a college degree lose $1.2 million and professional school graduates may lose up to $2 million. Not only are these inequities enormously detrimental to women and their families, wage inequities follow women into their retirement years, reducing their Social Security benefits, pensions, savings and other financial resources.Over fifteen years, a typical woman loses $499,101 due to pay inequity. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), if equal pay for women were instituted immediately, across the board, it would result in an annual $447.6 billion gain nationally for women and their families.Even men working in the 20 most common occupations for women earn more than women working in those same occupations. Women’s median pay was only equal in personal care and service work as of 2009. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics study from 2009, construction was the industry closest to gender pay equity.This narrowing of the gap has slowed substantially since the turn of the century. This means it took 44 years for the wage gap to close just 18 cents - a rate of less than half a penny a year. In 1963, when the Equal Pay Act was passed, full-time working women were paid 59 cents on average for every dollar paid to men.Ironically, the “Equality State” is the worst, with women in Wyoming earning just 64 percent of what their male counterparts make. In Washington, DC, women average 90 cents to every man’s dollar, partly due to transparency in government wages. Specifically for women of color, the gap is even wider: In comparison to a white, non-Hispanic man’s dollar, African American women earn only 64 cents and Latinas just 55 cents. According to the Shriver Report released in 2014, women’s average annual paychecks reflected only 77 cents for every $1.00 earned by men.This disparity not only affects women’s spending power, it penalizes their retirement security by creating gaps in Social Security and pensions. Women still are not receiving equal pay for equal work, let alone equal pay for work of equal value. These wage gaps stubbornly remain despite the passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, and a variety of other legislation prohibiting employment discrimination. For full-time, year-round workers, women are paid on average only 77 percent of what men are paid for women of color, the gap is significantly wider.

Equal pay for men and women