Black Women's Equal Pay Day is here -- what does that mean?
2 ideas currently gaining traction as employee benefits could perhaps help work toward whittling the wage gap as well.
At this time of year, year after year, a milestone passes by — the date at which Black women can finally say, “I have now made as much as a white man did last year.” But for Black women, it takes all of “last year” PLUS eight months and several days of “this year” to get to the same amount.
“The fact that we are talking about this every year reflects the stubborn, structural nature of pay inequities,” says the Economic Policy Institute in its recent analysis, “Black women face a persistent pay gap, including in essential occupations during the pandemic.”
What does such a pay inequity look like in dollars? According to the National Women’s Law Center, it amounts to a median wage gap of $2,009 a month, $24,110 a year and $964,400 over a 40-year career for Black women working full time compared to white men working full time.
Pay inequities
Pay inequities aren’t due just to “occupational segregation” where Black women lack access to education and training needed to obtain higher paying jobs and instead are shunted off into lower-skilled, lower-paying jobs. Because even in lower-paying (and, point in fact, high-COVID-risk) service jobs, Black women make less than their white male colleagues, according to the Economic Policy Institute:
- Black female wait staff make on average $9.39 an hour compared to white male wait staff, who make on average $10.51 an hour.
- Black female cashiers make $10.82 an hour compared to white male cashiers, who make $12.91 an hour.
And when Black women are in higher paying jobs, they still make less than their white male coworkers, according to the EPI. Take the medical profession:
- Black female physicians and surgeons make on average $46.59 an hour compared to white male physicians and surgeons, who make on average $63.41 an hour.
- Black female registered nurses make $28.74 an hour compared to white male registered nurses, who make $34.87 an hour.
There are many ways people advocate coming at this issue, including but not limited to ensuring more people in positions of organizational decisionmaking are Black women. But two ideas are of particular interest to the employee benefits industry, detailed in a report from the National Women’s Law Center and in a report from the American Association of University Women:
- Offer access to affordable, high quality child care.
- Offer student loan repayment assistance.
Access to affordable, high quality child care
Access to affordable, high quality child care would benefit all groups of Black women, the National Women’s Law Center states, “but the numbers are most dramatic for Black women without a high school degree, who could see a 25 percent reduction in the earnings gap between themselves and white men.”
The organization calculates that the higher earnings would, by retirement, “allow a Black woman working to accrue an additional $13,000 in Social Security benefits over her lifetime as a result of child care reform (compared to $8,000 for white women).”
Student loan assistance
Student loan debt repayment assistance would benefit potentially millions of workers. The Federal Reserve calculates that there are over 45 million Americans who owe student loan debt, to the tune of a total of $1.7 trillion.
According to the American Association of University Women’s 2021 report, Deeper in Debt, women borrow an average of $31,276. But American Indian, Pacific Islander and Black women take on more debt on average than white, Asian, or hispanic or Latina women, with Black women taking on the most.
The organization calculates women have on average “a monthly loan payment of $307 the year after graduation. Given that women graduating with a bachelor’s degree expect to earn an average of $35,338—only 81% of what men anticipate earning—meeting that loan obligation is challenging at best.”
The AAUW also connects this with the cost of child care:
“One year after college, women spend an average of $920 per month on housing, $396 per month on a car loan and, for the 16% of women who are moms, $520 on childcare….Adding in that $307 student loan payment makes it difficult—if not downright impossible—to make ends meet.”
Beyond the workplace, solutions on a federal policy level relating to fair/minimum wages, workplace harassment and discrimination and more could help narrow the wage inequities faced by Black women as well as other women of color, white women, and Black men.
Will there come a time when we won’t need to mark dates such as August 3, 2021? Yes, some research indicates, but that is estimated to be decades away. If there were no wage gap, according to the National Partnership for Women and Families, here’s what would happen, among other things:
“A working woman in the United States would have enough money for approximately:
- More than 13 additional months of child care;
- Nearly seven additional months of premiums for employer-based health insurance;
- Nearly 65 weeks of food (more than one year’s worth);
- [E]nough money to pay off student loan debt in just under three years.”
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