Tuesday is Black women’s Equal Pay Day — for 2020.
And that’s not because of the pandemic. It’s because Black women have to work 579 days to earn what white men do in 365.
In other words, it takes 214 more days for Black women to catch up with what white, non-Hispanic men earned last year — a disparity that over a working lifetime can amount to as much as $1 million less earned, according to the National Women’s Law Center.
“I’ve looked at this in a lot of different ways,” the center’s research director, Jasmine Tucker, told CNBC. “I’ve cut it by education, I’ve cut it by age, I’ve cut it by job. There’s a wage gap in 94% of occupations.”
The wage gap is much wider for Black women than for other women.
Women overall in 2020 earned 84% of what men earned, the Pew Research Center found in May, analyzing the median hourly earnings of full- and part-time workers. With that, it takes 42 more days of work for women to earn what men did in 2020.
U.S. Census Bureau research on full-time workers found that year-round working women earned 82% of what their male counterparts did.
Among full-time, year-round workers, Black women typically make just 63 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men, the NWLC’s Tucker said in a fact sheet. The disparity has shrunk by just 3 cents over the past 30 years, she said. At that pace it would take until 2130 to close the gap.
Full-time working moms in general earn 75 cents for every dollar paid to fathers, but Black working moms are paid just 52 cents on the dollar, the NWLC said.
The pandemic compounded the calculations because Black and women of color were harder hit by unemployment, with 18.3% of Black women losing their jobs between February 2020 and April 2020, compared with 13.2% of white men, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
President Biden noted the disparity and its egregiousness, calculating a penny less per dollar than even the NWLC did.
“This Black women’s Equal Pay Day, we must recognize a hard truth: It takes a Black woman nearly 20 months to earn what a white man makes in one year for the same exact work,” Biden said on Twitter. “It’s unconscionable. My Administration is committed to closing the gender pay gap once and for all.”
Companies can play a major role. They have a lot of opportunity to make up for those gaps by implementing inclusive hiring practices that center on Black and brown women; upping wage transparency with salary audits, equipping and supporting managers to be successful, wrote academic and author Mindy Harts for NBC News.
“I believe companies and organizations have another unique opportunity to not only invest in the women of color in the workplace, but also providing their managers with the tools to be successful,” Harts wrote. “The future of work can be successful for women of color if companies and organizations are willing to partner on the road to success.”
