Equal Wage Day
Never heard of it? Well, that’s today.
At least, THIS year, it’s today. It could change next year — hopefully it’ll be earlier in the calendar by the time 2011 rolls around.
Equal Wage Day, for those of you who do not know, is the day marking the number of days a woman would have had to work in 2009 to earn as much money as their male counterparts.
In our case, a man would have worked x days in 2009 to earn y amount of money… but in order to make that same amount, a woman would have had to work until April 20th of 2010. That’s an entire 110 more days.
Gender inequality, anyone? RAWR.
You can read the article on MSNBC Newsweek here.
But for now, here’s an excerpt:
Equal pay for equal work? Don’t bet on it. President Obama may have made the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act the very first act he signed into law as president, but women still earn just 77 cents on the dollar on average, when compared to men. African-American and Hispanic women earn even less. Yes, the number is an old refrain, repeated so often it has little impact. But in 2010, there’s more reason for everyone—women and men—to care about the persistent pay gap than ever before. Since the passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963, women’s wages have risen less than a half-penny per year, from 59 cents then to 77 cents now. Which is why, in 1996, the National Committee on Pay Equity created “Equal Pay Day,” an awareness campaign and yearly marker of just how much more women must work to earn what men earned in the year past. April 20 is Equal Pay Day this year, meaning that women must work 110 days into 2010 to make what their fathers, husbands, brothers, and male colleagues earned in 2009.
It wouldn’t bother me so much if Equal Pay Day was moving further and further forward in the calendar every year. But it’s been inching along incredibly slowly. I mean, the increase has only been a mere 18 cents over the past 47 years! We are still more than a hundred days away from making anywhere near what our male counterparts might earn in a year.
Don’t try to make the argument that it’s because there are more educated men or something like that. They’ve compared equally-scoring university graduates, too, and men consistently earn more than their female classmates in their first year of working. Over a lifetime, we women lose out on millions of dollars in wages that we are often just as qualified for. Yes. Millions.
RAWR.
I was always slightly infuriated by this, but I never knew it was this bad.
[The Coast of Misery] 