Equal Pay Day: It is everyone’s business

Equal Pay Day, which was marked last week, is an opportunity to assess how women fare in the workplace and determine how far into this year women must work to catch up to what men made in the previous year. The pandemic made this year’s Equal Pay Day both more complex, and a critical inflection point. In 2020, full-time, year-round working women were paid 83% on average of what their male counterparts were paid. The gender wage gap remains more alarming for Black and Hispanic women, who were paid 64% and 57%, respectively, of what non-Hispanic White men were paid.  

 

While overall men’s employment has fully recovered from pandemic-related job losses, there are still 1.5 million fewer employed women than compared to February 2020. Black women struggled the most during job recovery, with 3.1% fewer employed now than pre-pandemic. White women’s recovery has also lagged, with 2.2% fewer employed now.  

 

One factor contributing to employment losses for women — the care sector has been devastated causing a double-threat for working women: 

 

• Care service jobs are overwhelmingly female jobs. There are almost 12% fewer jobs in child daycare services than there were pre-pandemic and the same is true of nursing and residential care facilities, an industry that is still missing nearly 400,000 jobs — a crisis for women’s labor force participation.  

 

• Beyond the direct impact on labor force participation, women are typically responsible for caregiving, so the decline in paid care options for their loved ones is likely to impact women’s ability to stay in or return to the labor force.  

 

Labor force participation is a critical factor that impacts the gender wage gap, the disproportionate loss of jobs, and slow recovery among women, particularly women of color. A reality that does not bode well for the economic landscape.  

 

But there are other factors at play in the wage gap, as well.  

 

Recent Women’s Bureau studies show that most of the gender wage gap cannot be explained by differences in men’s and women’s work histories, industry distribution, or job characteristics, implying that other factors, including discrimination, are at play. Research also shows that jobs with higher percentages of women pay wages lower on average than similar male-dominant occupations. In other words, quite simply, traditional female jobs tend to be devalued.  

 

Lower wages are anchors that weigh women down even while they gain new skills and move into progressively more responsible jobs. You see, some employers set wages based on a worker’s previous earnings or salary history, despite warnings to avoid doing so, as it is a discriminatory wage practice that can lead to justifying pay gaps. As a result, if a woman has been undervalued in the past, that past will stay with her in her subsequent jobs if they base her new salary on her salary history. 

 

A pause in work to care for family or any other reason — as so many women did during the pandemic — disrupts earnings and can also result in an earnings penalty. Only 23% of U.S. workers have access to paid leave through work, and these rates are lower among part-time workers and those in the service sector, who are disproportionately female. Without these benefits, women are more likely to confront work-related repercussions such as setbacks in earnings.  

 

Solutions to the gender pay gap must address the multiple ways it drains women’s wallets. This includes building new career paths for women into apprenticeship and higher paying jobs, expanding access to paid leave, banning the use of salary histories in setting pay, rebuilding care infrastructure with higher quality jobs, and developing affordable care for workers.  

 

Wages must be set for work that people do, not the people who do the work. This Equal Pay Day, let’s work together to build greater opportunities for women and take action to close the gender wage gap.  

 

Charmaine Davis is the regional administrator for the Southeast Region of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau. She has been working to support the advancement of women in the workplace with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau since 2016.