April 10 marked Equal Pay Day, the day when—on average—women’s wages symbolically “catch up” to men’s wages from the previous year.
In the April 20 episode of “The Progressive Happy Hour,” co-hosts Christin “Cici” Battle and Drew Courtney sat down with Joi Chaney, executive director of Equal Pay Today!, to talk about the ongoing fight for gender and racial pay equity.
Joi noted that the pay gap is far wider for women of color than for white women. “For Black women, the Equal Pay Day is all the way on August 7—and that’s at 63 cents, compared to a dollar a white, non-Hispanic man makes. For Latina women, that’s 54 cents, and they’re not until November 1…That’s unacceptable in 2018,” she said. “That’s a loss in retirement income, that’s a loss in day-to-day ability to pay for basic needs.”
She explained that some of the prime contributors to the pay gap may not be what most people think, including: the use of prior salaries in hiring, occupational segregation by gender, lack of paid leave, lack of affordable child care, and workplace sexual harassment.
Also in this episode, Cici and Drew discuss Kendrick Lamar’s historic Pulitzer Prize win and Beyoncé’s epic Coachella performance.
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