2

The Benjamins

A couple of years ago, Cynthia shared something that happened to her at an office party. She was at an event for an advertising firm where she worked, looked around the room, and suddenly realized that the vast majority of people who worked at the firm were women. In a party setting, it was obvious. Cynthia asked her boss why. He told her, “I can pay them less.”

“I was twenty-three and shocked,” Cynthia shared. “I hadn’t yet learned I was less valuable than a man.”

This is not right. Obviously the contributions of women aren’t any less valuable than contributions from men. Not even a little bit. In fact, study after study show that businesses tend to make higher profits with women in leadership and that better decisions are made when there are diverse decision makers. For instance, one study found female hedge fund managers outperformed men by 8.95 percent to 2.69 percent, respectively, on returns.¹ A nineteen-year study of all Fortune 500 companies by Pepperdine University found a direct correlation between high levels of women in leadership and higher profits—and that promoting women meant outperforming the competition.² But despite those facts, women are still treated unfairly: Women are judged more harshly, paid unequally, and discriminated against in the labor force.

When it comes to pay, the Benjamins go to the Benjamins, quite literally. I’m not sure when I first got the gory details on the wage discrimination women face each and every day in the United States of America. All I really remember is thinking, Oh, $hit, accompanied by a sinking feeling that women still had a lot of work to do. More than I ever imagined before looking at the numbers, in fact. If you haven’t heard the wage gap numbers yet, apologies in advance if what you’re about to read makes you a bit nauseous and then more than a little bit irate.

The U.S. Census reports that women, on average, earned just 80 cents to a man’s dollar in 2017 for all year-round full-time workers. That being said, both moms and women of color experience increased wage hits.³ More specifically, the data shows that white, non-Hispanic women are earning only 75 cents;⁴ Black women only 63 cents; Native American women only 57 cents; and Latina women only 54 cents for every dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men. Asian American and Pacific Islander women experience a smaller wage gap on average,⁵ but still make only 87 cents on average for every dollar made by white non-Hispanic men, with some subgroups of Asian American and Pacific Islander women experiencing much bigger wage gaps.⁶

Transgender women also receive unequal pay,⁷ with one study finding that the earnings of transgender women dropped by nearly one-third following their transition.⁸

Laura found proof of the wage gap in her marriage. She and her husband met at Columbia University and graduated with the same degree. They both got jobs at the same agency in the exact same position. However, they were dumbfounded by the difference in their salaries. She made $5,000 less than he did. When Laura asked the agency about the discrepancy, she was given the runaround. Basically she was told to accept the pay or they would give the job to someone else.

Though Laura’s example is pretty clear, the wage gap women face is often more complicated than it first looks. For instance, Asian American and Pacific Islander women seem to be doing better than women overall, earning on average 87 cents to a white man’s dollar. But that doesn’t tell the full story. Broad categories don’t give the whole picture. This is especially true for Asian American and Pacific Islander women. Miriam Yeung, co-founder of We Belong Together and former executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, explains that the ethnicity of Asian American and Pacific Islander women includes a tremendous number of diverse countries. A closer look at the numbers reveal that Burmese women are earning only 44 cents to a white man’s dollar, Fijian women are earning 45 cents, and Nepalese women are earning just 51 cents.⁹ “There hasn’t been enough attention to build a strong women of color analysis yet that fully includes Asian American and Pacific Islander women in it,” Miriam revealed.

It Gets Worse

Sometimes I feel like Alice going down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, White Rabbit–style, when I start digging into the numbers behind the numbers. Or, if I’m up working too late at night, images of myself as a data detective, pipe in mouth and an intriguing hat tilted jauntily on my head with a Nancy Drew–like obsession for solving the mysteries hidden in Excel files, have come to mind.

Put on your imaginary detective hat, because our dive down into numbers isn’t over. That’s because for the 81 percent of women who become mothers, the wage gap is even bigger, and it’s bigger still for moms of color. The truth is that right now, in the United States of America, being a mom is a greater predictor of wage and hiring discrimination than being a woman. Our country, which claims to love, adore, and respect motherhood, pays moms just 71 cents to every dollar that dads earn.¹⁰ To get a real picture of what’s going on, here are the specific numbers: Asian American and Pacific Islander mothers are paid 85 cents; white, non-Hispanic mothers are paid 69 cents; Black mothers are paid 51 cents; Native American mothers are paid 49 cents; and Latina mothers are paid just 46 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic fathers. Furthermore, mothers in low-wage jobs are paid just 66 cents for every dollar paid to fathers in low-wage jobs.¹¹

Felicia experienced blatant wage discrimination while working at a technical support center for a large retail corporation. She was hired to work the exact same job as her brother-in-law, and after talking to him discovered that she was being paid about $4 an hour less to do the exact same job. She went on to find out that all of the men at work, working the same job, with the same amount of experience, were making $4 an hour more than her. And, as it turns out, all the women were making the lower wage. The wage gap hurts women, families, and our economy.

Singled Out

Moms in general—whether minimum wage earners or beyond—earn just 71 cents to every dollar that dads earn, but the discrimination in pay is compounded for single moms and their children.¹² Paid just 55 cents for every dollar paid to all fathers,¹³ single mothers are among those who face the worst wage discrimination in our nation.¹⁴

When Tara was growing up, her family was barely able to get by. Tara and her mom (who was single) lived with Tara’s grandmother, which was the only way that her mom would have enough money to get gas to go back and forth from work and to purchase essentials. After a while, Tara and her mom moved into a place with her uncle. If it was not for her grandma and her uncle, they would have had a hard time keeping a roof over their heads and getting food to eat.

The wage discrimination that single moms like Tara’s face is impacting a tremendous and growing number of women and children. A study from Johns Hopkins University found that 57 percent of babies born to millennials were not born within a marriage. Technically these are “single mothers” by many people’s definition, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a partner.

Family structure and our culture is changing.¹⁵ Currently, 69 percent of American children live with two parents (down from 88 percent in 1960) and 23 percent live with a single mother (up from 8 percent in 1960).¹⁶ It’s important to note that even though the number of children who live with single mothers has nearly tripled since 1960, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a same-sex partner involved, and it also doesn’t mean that dads or other partners aren’t involved. For instance, while Black families have some of the lowest marriage rates in our nation¹⁷, studies show that Black fathers, regardless of marital and cohabitation status, are the most involved with their children’s daily lives of any group of fathers in our nation.¹⁸

The numbers demonstrate that family structure and the story of families has changed, but our workplace structures and public policy are outdated. Our economy and our families are both negatively affected by the fact that many of our key public policies have fallen behind the realities that numerous women and families in America are living in right now. It’s on all of us to catch up.

Mia Birdsong, co-director of Family Story, is one of the few people focused on the incredibly important work of combating the racism, sexism, and classism that’s permeated much of our culture’s view of families. Among other things, Birdsong and her organization are hard at work updating our country’s outdated picture of the typical family in America. Birdsong was inspired to help launch Family Story because she noticed that there is greater system-wide support for “nuclear” families than other family structures. In other words, our national policies, workplaces, and culture often discriminate against families that don’t match a 1950s imaginary vision of one mom, one dad, and two kids—even though that family structure is becoming the exception, not the rule. The change Birdsong wants to see is an end to a hierarchy of family structures so all types of families are able to access the resources they need without prejudice regardless of gender roles, race, and class. I couldn’t agree more. It’s long past time to update outdated ideas about families in our nation.

The Double-Wage-Hit Whammy

Lani, a working mom, shared that the wage gap makes it nearly impossible for her or her wife to stay home with their children—despite having “good” jobs as attorneys. Both moms went back to work when their baby was only three months old. It was just basic math. Lani says, “When my wife and I sat down and figured out how much we each made and the cost of childcare, we found that between rental prices in our region and student loans, there was no way for either of us to be out of the labor force.”

Lani and her wife ended up delaying plans to have a second child because childcare prices are so high. There’s no way they could afford to have two children in childcare, so they have to wait. At the same time, the clock is ticking: They can’t wait too long and risk fertility issues. Two moms face a double-wage-hit whammy, but two dads get a double boost, and that has an impact on the options open to them as parents. The New York Times reported that couples with two dads are the most likely to have a stay-at-home parent, a heterosexual couple is the next most likely, and two moms are the least likely even if they want to because it’s often simply unaffordable.¹⁹

Clearly, sexuality also needs to be front and center in any discussion of the wage gap as it intersects and adds up to be a double or triple whammy on the pocketbook. In our nation, 4.2 percent of people between the ages of eighteen and forty-four identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, with 62 percent of that cohort being female. Further data find that 71 percent of all those who identify as bisexual are female, and 49 percent of all those who identify as lesbian or gay are female. In addition, a recent study found that 1.4 million individuals identify as transgender.²⁰

When marching for equity and equality, discrimination based on sexuality and gender identity absolutely must not be forgotten.

Busting the Myths

Let’s take a minute to discuss some reasons why women are not being paid less. For instance, many people cite that the wage gap is due to women taking lesser-paying jobs. Not true. Wage differences within the same occupations account for much of the pay gap between men and women in many job categories, whether a doctor or a clerk. While women are, on the whole, concentrated in lower-wage job areas, this doesn’t explain away the wage gap; it just makes the economic pressure greater because unfair pay pushes many women and families into poverty.

Women are actually graduating from college in higher numbers than men.²¹ But after only one year in the workforce, young women are already earning less than equally qualified young men in many occupations.²²

Claudia Goldin, a labor economist at Harvard University, has found in studying age, race, work hours, and education that people working in the exact same sectors experience wage gaps. For instance, female doctors and surgeons earn 71 percent of men’s wages. Female financial specialists earn 66 percent of men’s wages.²³

Wage and hiring discrimination has been a major hurdle for women since we joined the workforce.²⁴ This is discrimination against women in real time. This is what happens when inadvertent implicit bias against women runs unchecked, even though studies show that the work women do is far from inferior. Of course, there’s not a secret committee of people deciding to pay women less, but the subconscious negative assumptions about women and work add up to a massive amount of money lost for women over time.

To be clear: No one is proposing that everyone gets paid the same thing for doing different jobs. This fight is focused on equal pay for equal work. No more, no less. Women also experience increased unfair pay pressure because we are more likely to be concentrated in fewer types of jobs, notes Sarah Jane Glynn in a paper for the Center for American Progress. Furthermore, those job types are also more likely to be dominated by women—a fact that often leads to lower wages for that job sector as a whole. (Interestingly, studies also show that when women start to be a high percentage of any profession, the overall pay levels of that profession often get lower. That’s exactly what’s happened with the veterinarian field. As the percentage of women veterinarians rose, salaries decreased.²⁵) This trend leads to female-dominated industries paying lower wages than male-dominated industries that require similar skill levels. These trends have also played a role in women making up the majority of minimum-wage workers in the United States.²⁶

But it’s not just low wages that are impacted. The effect of wage discrimination is strong in jobs that require higher levels of education and pay higher wages, too.²⁷

Naysayers—who are usually a medley of corporate CEOs, conservative legislators, and media pundits—often ridiculously (and insultingly) argue that the wage gap doesn’t deserve attention because women just aren’t negotiating enough, aren’t equally qualified, are trading pay for benefits,²⁸ or other ludicrous excuses.²⁹ But the wage gap can’t be blamed on women for a supposed “lack of confidence” or a lack of leaning in. That particular blame game raises my blood pressure, particularly because it often comes in the form of self-help advice gone awry. For instance, Claire Shipman and Katty Kay’s viral article several years ago in The Atlantic, “The Confidence Gap,”³⁰ has been repeatedly used—whether Shipman and Kay intended it or not—to argue that women’s lack of confidence is responsible for gender barriers in the workforce. One Forbes article, directly following their line of reasoning, put the blame squarely on women’s shoulders for not reaching top management positions. The article said, “Women, we aren’t taking action often enough and that’s crucial. We don’t have to be perfect. Men are confident about their ability at 60%.”³¹

Balderdash. (Yes, that’s the word that came to my mind.)

The truth is that women ask for raises just as often as men, but women are granted raises less often—and to make matters worse, women are also regularly penalized for asking.³²

Unfortunately, many people believe the balderdash because it seeps out into our communities and workforce. In fact, in 2017 (yes, 2017, not 1917) an all-male panel of notable public relations professionals at a PRWeek conference demonstrated a moment of pure balderdash in action. When the panel was confronted with the fact that women PR professionals earn an average of $36,000 less than men in the field, several shared the opinion that women need to “speak up more loudly” about unfair pay. Ironically the panelist who said that the loudest, Richard Edelman, the CEO of the largest independently owned PR firm in the world, had just proved exactly how and why speaking up isn’t always a solution for women. At the panel, Edelman said that when women in his firm spoke up to him about wage gaps, he told them, “You speak up first.”³³ Uh, first? These women were already speaking up first by bringing up the issue of unfair pay directly to the CEO of the company. This was a true #HeadDesk moment.

What we’re seeing is flat-out discrimination. The wage gap isn’t the result of women’s lack of confidence, quietness, or bad choices—and it’s also certainly not a reflection of men being “more motivated by money” than women, as New Hampshire state representative Will Infantine said as he argued against the New Hampshire Paycheck Equality Act.³⁴ (The word balderdash just came to mind again!)

There is very real wage and hiring discrimination going on—and it hits moms and women of color the hardest.³⁵ One series of studies painted a stark picture. Moms were hired 80 percent less often than women with equal résumés who didn’t have children. And when moms are hired, they’re offered salaries that are on average $11,000 lower than what’s offered to non-moms. On the other hand, dads with equal résumés were offered $6,000 more than non-dads,³⁶ proving that the antiquated idea that only men need paychecks large enough to support their families is alive and well (not to mention, keeping many families poor and hungry). Studies have also shown that employees who identified as mothers are perceived to be less competent, less promotable, and less likely to be recommended for management, despite having the same credentials as non-mothers.³⁷ Still today, women have to think about whether to hide their status as mothers during job interviews.

All told, this is a big deal. A major study found that men receive a wage bonus of 11.6 percent when they become fathers. But moms, on the other hand, get a wage penalty for motherhood of 4 percent per child; that, Michelle J. Budig, writing in Third Way, reports, “Cannot be explained by human capital, family structure, family-friendly job characteristics, or differences among women that are stable over time… This motherhood penalty is larger among low-wage workers while the top 10% of female workers incur no motherhood wage penalty.”³⁸

The Wage Gaps Add Up

Often when books are written and stories are told about the fight for women’s equality, the main focus is only on highly paid professional women breaking the glass ceiling and the hurdles women face in those sectors. That’s an important conversation to have, and one that’s included in the next chapter, but it’s time for a reality check: The hourly wage gaps are adding up into annual earnings gaps. Here’s what that looks like:

That’s right: Only 10 percent of all women in the labor force earn $75,000 or more annually, which means 90 percent of all working women earn less. In fact, 31 percent of women are in the next lower wage bracket, earning between $30,000 and $74,999 annually, and the majority of working women (59 percent) earn less than $30,000 annually³⁹—while only 40 percent of men earn less than $30,000 annually.

Christy shares that in her life, the wage gap, coupled with low wages, caused her to have two or three minimum jobs at one time when her sons were young in order to make ends meet. Even with that extra work, Christy often still couldn’t get her young children proper dental care, tutoring, or clothing when they needed it.

Men and dads, on the other hand, don’t face the same levels of hour by hour wage discrimination that women and moms face each day; and it all adds up to men and dads having higher annual wages than women and moms:

There are many negative rippling repercussions to a full 90 percent of women earning less than $75,000 a year, more than half of whom are earning less than $30,000 a year. One is that too many women are working hard, playing by the rules, and still falling below the poverty line—and are struggling to raise families and open doors for their children to thrive.

Paying Women Unfairly Hurts Our Economy

Wage discrimination against women and moms needs to stop. It’s hurting our economy, our businesses, our families, and our communities. It’s not just me who thinks this. Economic studies show that equal pay for women would boost our entire national economy. A recent analysis of data over time by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that if women received equal pay for equal work, it would cut poverty by more than half for women and families and add $513 billion to our national economy.⁴⁰

Having pay parity, studies find, would increase our gross domestic product by at least 3 percent.⁴¹ Why? When women don’t have funds to spend in our consumer-fueled economy, businesses have fewer customers and there is lower economic activity across our nation on the whole. And the lower wages don’t just reduce economic activity now. Reduced wages also reduce retirement savings, leading to poverty in our sunset years. The Benjamins really do add up quickly—both personally and for our country as a whole.

We can do better for everyone and for our economy. To start, we need to update our outdated family economic security policies to help fully close the gap. Families need access to paid family and medical leave, earned sick days, and affordable childcare. We cannot close the gaps between moms and women without children, and between women and men overall, without these policies. Of course, we also need pay transparency legislation like the Paycheck Fairness Act so that apples-to-apples comparisons of pay can be made and outright discrimination can be stopped in its tracks. It doesn’t take rocket science to move these policies forward. We’ve already seen a lot of forward movement at the state levels because of people reaching out to elected leaders. It takes as many people as possible raising their voices and demanding that change happen.

Make no mistake: Together we can march our entire nation forward, not just for women but for everyone. To do that we work for pay transparency policies, raising the minimum wage, fair pay, and family economic security policies like access to paid family/medical leave and affordable childcare, all of which lower the wage gaps. When women win, America wins—and women can lift our nation.