Equal Pay Day marks the point in the year when women's earnings finally catch up to what men made the year before, and the exact date moves every year depending on how the gap shifts. Women working full-time, year-round are currently paid about 81 cents for every dollar paid to men, according to the National Women's Law Center, a gap that has widened for two years running after decades of slow, uneven progress.
But the headline date is only one marker on a calendar that runs nearly the entire year, and broken down by race and ethnicity, the gap widens the further into that calendar you go. Asian American women's Equal Pay Day usually lands earliest, in early spring, not far behind the national date: Asian women are the only group who out-earn white women on average, at around 96 cents on the dollar versus roughly 77 cents for white women.
Black Women's Equal Pay Day typically falls in midsummer, marking around 65 cents. Latina Equal Pay Day usually lands in the fall, at about 58 cents. And Native Women's Equal Pay Day is almost always the last one on the calendar, arriving in late November: Native women earn just under 58 cents on the dollar, meaning it can take them nearly two years to earn what a white man earns in one. (The AAUW's Equal Pay Day Calendar publishes the exact current dates and ratios every year, since both shift annually.)
Discrimination based on disability, age, and sexual orientation can make it doubly difficult for women to earn what they deserve. LGBTQIA+ Equal Pay Awareness Day, marked every June 17, exists in part because so little federal data is collected on sexual orientation and gender identity that a single national ratio is hard to pin down.
What research does exist is stark: a Human Rights Campaign Foundation report found transgender women are paid about 60 cents for every dollar earned by the average worker, one of the widest gaps of any group in the workforce. Equal Pay Day coverage often centers cisgender women, but trans women, especially trans women of color, are dealing with some of the steepest inequities of all.
Women make up 69 percent of workers in jobs that typically pay less than $10 an hour, a wage range that includes many child care workers, home health aides, and fast food workers. Women are also underrepresented in higher-wage occupations because they're frequently discouraged from or pushed out of better-paying fields such as STEM. (As Larry Summers, Harvard's then-president, publicly opined that women are underrepresented in science because of "innate" differences between the sexes, imagine what's said behind closed doors.)
So, contrary to what many male pundits would have you believe, the pay gap is neither a myth nor an accident. The United States was established as a white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist nation; pay inequity is just one of the many oppressions that characterize our country.
As we've written before, racism doesn't always wear a white hood; it can take the form of objectification or avoidance. It can also mean that white Americans see some battles as "theirs" and some as "others'." But just as the responsibility lies on white people to end the systems of racial oppression they've designed, the responsibility lies on men to end systems of sexist oppression.
Because it's not like we only realize we're getting underpaid on the day the calendar says so. Our four months, six months, or even ten months of lost wages every year add up over time: one recent estimate puts the toll at $542,800 lost over a 40-year career, more than a decade of unpaid labor by the numbers. It's not theoretical for us; it's not one day or five days; and it's no myth. Whether we work as freelance contractors, creatives, or full-time or part-time employees, we earn less.
The bad news is that tackling pay inequity won't be easy; the people who perpetuate it have a vested stake in its continuation. But there are ways to move the needle forward.
Get educated
Pay equity is one of the big issues we tackle as feminists. Misogyny and underpaying women go hand in hand. If women were perceived as valuable, respected, and equally important, it would be impossible to justify paying them less than men. Feminism is a critical tool to illuminate how many people, including women, perceive women as less-than.
We need to educate ourselves at all economic levels and arm ourselves with information. (The AAUW Equal Pay Day Calendar, updated every year, is a good place to start.) We can teach children and adults about dismantling patriarchy starting at the family, community, or organizational level.
Fight the Battles You Can Fight
Not everyone is in the position to lobby for higher wages or a better salary, and the very real fear of repercussions can keep us from advocating for ourselves. As a freelance writer, I've made it a habit to share what I earn with other writers, and vice versa, so we know what to ask for from the same publications.
If you work for a company, I recommend pulling together the pay information you have available into a shareable document where people can anonymously log their wages or salaries. Knowing what people earn at the same level can help build support for collective lobbying for better pay throughout the company. If you're leaving your job for another, I also recommend sharing any useful information with the person hired after you.
Men, Use Your Privilege
Men, particularly white men, can leverage their privileged positions to advocate for equal pay within the workplace. White men have the most social, political, and economic power. While women who become mothers see their salaries decrease, fathers actually experience the opposite.
White men can also share what their pay is with their non-white and non-male co-workers. Pay secrecy is inherently anti-feminist, and it strengthens pay inequality. If "nothing's wrong" with the way we pay people and if "the wage gap is a myth," what's the harm in information sharing?
Interrogate Capitalism
We need to be honest about the exploitative nature of capitalism and ask whether it's the best system under which to organize our society. Writer Katie Klabusich made this case in a piece for The Establishment, a feminist outlet that closed in 2019 and now exists only in the archive: rather than handing the next generation our still-unfinished fights to carry, she argued, we should let them dream up and light their own.
Capitalism is an inherently unequal system; it reduces human beings to widget losers and widget winners. History has proven time and again that the way things have always been is not necessarily the way things should always be. Instead of constantly struggling to address the problems created by a system that privileges capital over our planet's sustainability, human fairness, and mutual respect, it might be time to address the system itself.
If this made you angry, that's the point. Share your number, ask a coworker theirs, and get the Girlboss Daily for the wage data and negotiation tools to back you up when you do.
