A new study released on Equal Pay Day demonstrates the wage gap along intersectional gender lines
Filipina-American Tessy Rivera is a single mother of two daughters. She is currently a case manager at a behavioral health facility in Torrance, California.
She’s just like a lot of other single mothers, she says. She gets up very early in the morning, prepares breakfast for her two girls, drops them off at school, works for “sometimes 10 hours a day,: picks up her daughters from their lola, prepares dinner and puts them to sleep.
“It’s a cycle. It’s a difficult cycle, but it’s one I’m happy to ride,” Rivera, 39, shared with the Asian Journal in a recent interview in her home in Echo Park.
A case manager for 10 years, she has worked at several other clinics before. She says that one of the reasons why she left her last post was because of her salary.
After an intimate conversation with some of her coworkers about their salaries, she found out that a young male co-worker, who holds the same position but has less experience, made nearly 10 percent more than she does.
“I can’t say I was shocked. Mad, yes. Shocked, no,” she lamented. “It’s disturbing and I know it’s, like, one of the first things that people bring up when they talk about equal rights. It’s a discussion that has a lot of mileage to it, but that has promoted not a lot of action that I’ve seen. I hated to leave that job because that’s difficult when you have children, but I knew my work could be fairly valued somewhere else.”
Though it seems like the world is moving closer to some semblance of equality, women like Rivera still live with the same salary grievances first discussed decades ago at the advent of women’s liberation: on average, men earn more than women.
A new study from the National Partnership for Women & Families reaffirmed that decades-long discussion that the gender wage gap puts women at a great disadvantage: overall, women in the United States are paid 80 cents for every dollar men earn.
That makes the annual gender wage gap at $10,086.
The report found that the average full-time employed woman in California is paid 88 cents for every dollar that a man makes, which adds up to a $5,928 difference in pay annually.
But in 2018, the wage gap discussion is no longer binary and when broken down among the races, the gap tells a larger story. In California, Asian women are paid $19,613 less than men annually. For Black women and Latinas, the annual wage gap is $27,437 and $41,251, respectively.
A deeper look into the races shows that even within the group of Asian women, certain ethnicities are paid even lower for every male dollar earned. Burmese, Samoan, and Hmong women, for example, only earn 51 cents, 56 cents and 59 cents for every dollar paid to a white man, respectively.
“The wage gap among Asian and Pacific Islander groups show that Asian women are not model minorities and different ethnicities continue to suffer from large gaps in wages,” the study said.
Moreover, Chinese and Indian women are generally paid more than white men, but Filipina, Vietnamese and Korean women are paid less.
“I may have understood it if we were living in the 50s or 60s where the traditional family with a husband and wife still existed, but that’s not how a lot of us live. There are a lot of single mothers out there who still have to suffer through [wage inequality] to provide for the entire family,” Rivera shared.
And the study affirms that reality for all groups of women. An intersectional look at the wage gap shows that mothers, in particular, receive a substantial blow. Mothers — and single mothers like Rivera — are the sole breadwinners in half of the families with children under 18. This includes 53 percent of Latina mothers, 81 percent of Black mothers and 44 AAPI mothers.
Mothers who work full-time, year-round jobs are paid just 71 cents for every dollar that a father earns.
If the gender pay gap were eliminated, the average working woman in the U.S. could have enough money for 14 more months of child care, 74 more weeks of food for her family and more than one additional year of university fees and 10 additional months of rent, according to the study.
So why is it that in a time where seismic feminist shifts are occurring in the current culture that women and people of color are still slighted in wage?
Analysis from the National Partnership survey shows that while certain criteria exist in many occupations (education, experience, region, unionization, etc.), there is still 38 percent of the gap that has been unaccounted for, which leads researchers to deduce that race and gender-based discrimination continue to affect wages for women and women of color.
“It’s clear that discrimination contributes to it — and equally clear that it’s causing grave harm to women, families and the country,” National Partnership President Debra L. Ness said in a statement. “Lawmakers have not done nearly enough to end wage discrimination based on gender and race. If our country is to thrive, we must root out bias in wages, reject outdated stereotypes and stop penalizing women for having children and caring for their families.”
Ness suggests that lawmakers should double down on efforts to end gender and race discrimination in the workplace, end sexual harassment “which impedes women’s job advancement,” implement a federal paid family and medical leave measure and increase access to high-quality and affordable reproductive health care.
The wage gap discussion began decades ago when the landmark Equal Pay Act of 1963 which made it illegal for employers to grant unequal wages to men and women who performed equal work.
In 2009, Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 which loosened timeliness requirements for filing workplace discrimination suits, which signaled another spark in the wage disparity discourse.
Despite these efforts, the wage gap has persisted through loopholes and patterns of discrimination that bypass existing legislation. But lawmakers in Washington haven’t stopped authoring laws that would move the country toward equal pay along race and gender lines.
The Paycheck Fairness Act was introduced by U.S. Sen. Patty Murphy (D-Wash.) and U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) in 2017 and seeks to close those loopholes by providing more rights for employees, incentives and assistance for employers to impose equal pay practices and direct the Dept. of Labor to hold employers accused of illegal wage discrimination accountable.
And most Americans do support policies that would address and close the pay gap. In a 2016 survey from research group American Women, 89 percent of registered voters said they would favor (57 percent said they would “strongly favor”) legislation that would hold employers accountable, protect workers from discriminatory wage practices and provide salary negotiation training for women.
For the last several decades, advocates have been fighting tooth and nail to close the wage gap. Significant social and legislative reforms have materialized, but the disparities persist.
The National Partnership predicted that “at the current rate, the wage gap will not close until 2059” which means that “wage inequities will persist and compound year after year for women and their families, affecting their incomes now and their retirement income and savings in the future.”
The complex issue of wage inequality will likely require more than a one-size-fits-all fix, and when asked what she thinks should happen first in order to close the wage gap, Rivera swiftly replied, “Elect more women in public office. Elect more women of color in office. They know us and they get it. That should be the first step.”
