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Today, April 10, marks Equal Pay Day — the date the average woman in America would need to work until in 2018 in order to earn what men were paid in 2017. According to Valerie Wilson, the director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, “For African-American women, Equal Pay Day this year will come on August 7. For Hispanic women, it will come November 1.”
On the latest episode of Today, Explained, Vox’s senior policy correspondent Sarah Kliff and Wilson joined Sean Rameswaram to talk about how things like motherhood and race impact the gender pay gap.
“Women get more graduate degrees than men at this point,” explains Kliff. “Women’s labor force participation has risen hugely over the past few decades. The one thing that has not changed is this expectation that when couples have children, it is the women who are going to step back and take care of them. And that expectation really seems to be at the heart of the wage gap that exists in 2018.”
Wilson adds, “There’s little left to explain the fact that there is a disparity by gender and by race other than racism and sexism and the role that those play in how people get paid, whether or not they get hired, whether or not they get promoted ...”
Even though there is progress being made — thanks in part to the Equal Pay Act passed in 1963 — we still have a long way to go. Learn more about the gender wage gap, whom it hurts most, and possible solutions to it by listening to the latest episode of Today, Explained.
Related reading:
- A stunning chart shows the true cause of the gender wage gap (Sarah Kliff)
- The truth about the gender wage gap (Sarah Kliff)
- 9th Circuit: you can’t pay women less than men just because they made less at their last job (Alexia Fernández Campbell)
- Black-white wage gaps expand with rising wage inequality (Valerie Wilson and William M. Rodgers III, Economic Policy Institute)
How do I get even more Today, Explained?
You can get the news we’re reading throughout the day, facts and stats to make you smarter about the world, and behind-the-scenes photos on Twitter at @Today_Explained. You can follow Sean Rameswaram at @Rameswaram, Sarah Kliff at @SarahKliff, and Valerie Wilson at @ValerieRWilson.
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