What do you do when you are outraged that women still earn, on average, 80 cents on every dollar earned by a man?  One good option is to get together with others who share your indignation.  About fifty women and men marked 2019 Equal Pay Day, April 2, with an (Un)Happy Hour in Washington, DC, sponsored by WILL Empower. Equal Pay Day is the day in 2019 when women finally earned as much as did men in 2018.

Union organizers, non-profit activists, Georgetown University students, nurses, retirees, and concerned early-career women shared wood-fired pizza and craft beers at Pizza Paradiso, one of the few woman-owned restaurants in the area.  Many came dressed in red, to mark the fact that women are “still in the red.” 

Shouts of “boo” rang out when the crowd learned that the wage gap means that women lose an average of $10,169 each year!  They also heard that the wage gap is even worse for women of color — on average Latinas are paid only 53 cents, and black women just 61 cents on every dollar earned by a white male. 

There are lots of causes driving the nation’s wage gap.  In some cases, women are simply paid less for the same jobs. Georgetown nursing school students who attended the (Un)Happy hour were shocked to learn that male nurses make more than female nurses, for instance.  In some cases, there’s a wage gap because society undervalues the kinds of caring and education jobs most likely to be held by women.  In addition, women are penalized for being the child care and elder care giver.  In fact, if you take into account all the times women have to drop out of the work force to do care work, women only earn 49 cents to every male collar, according to a recent study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

How do we fix this?  “We can standardize rates of pay, require bosses to say how much they pay everyone, enforce anti-discrimination laws, and allow workers more paid family leave,” pointed out WILL Empower co-director Lane Windham. We can also support the Paycheck Fairness Act, which passed the House last week but likely will die in the Senate.  Unions also help close the wage gap. Hourly wages for women represented by unions are 23 percent higher than those for non-unionized women.

The group also learned that it’s not too late to apply to be part of the 2019 WILL Empower Apprenticeship class. Applications are due April 15. 

WILL Empower is a new initiative to build women’s labor leadership.  It is a joint project of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, and the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization at Rutgers University SMLR.