Equal Pay Day is approaching March 15. The day represents how lengthy into 2022 the typical lady within the U.S. has to work to have been paid as a lot since January 1, 2021, as the typical man was paid in 2021. March 15 is the day we observe Equal Pay Day for girls of all races, however for Black and Latina and Native girls, the date comes a lot later—and extra so this yr, following a recalculation based mostly on pandemic-era employment patterns that pushed many ladies out of full-time work.
Whereas pay inequity declined between 1979 and 1994, that was largely due to males’s stagnating wages slightly than girls’s rising ones, the Financial Coverage Institute’s Elise Gould writes, and it has barely budged since then. And it’s even though, since 1994, girls’s academic achievement has outpaced males’s. Now, “Ladies with superior levels are paid much less, on common, than males with bachelor’s levels.”
Equal pay is about girls’s lives—about whether or not they will pay the payments and feed their households and have slightly house for relaxation or pleasure. It’s additionally about energy—whether or not girls can stroll away from an abusive or just sad relationship, whether or not they can combat office harassment and abuse. And once we take into consideration unequal pay, it’s at all times essential to keep in mind that unions are one of the essential methods to extend pay fairness. That’s why Union Ladies Equal Pay Day got here a month in the past.
