LIVE: Black Women’s Equal Pay Day Highlights Severe Gender-Based Income Inequality

LIVE: Black Women’s Equal Pay Day Highlights Severe Gender-Based Income Inequality

With women in executive leadership as the exception rather than the rule, Kelly Nevins, Executive Director of The Women’s Fund of RI, says companies and individuals need to take steps to ensure women are compensated fairly and given fair opportunities to succeed in the workplace.

August 7 marks Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, several months later than the more often recognized Equal Pay Day in April. The date is meant to symbolically show how long it takes for women’s pay to “catch up” as compared to men’s. However, the gap for women of color, Hispanic, and Asian women is even wider than their white counterparts. According to WFRI, on average, white women earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by male counterparts, while African-American women earn 64 cents and Hispanic women earn 56 cents.

Nevins says this disparity is compounded when companies hire based on unconscious biases, often excluding or overlooking female candidates regardless of their quality as a candidate. In addition, though women are just as likely to seek promotions or salary increases as men, they are more often ignored or undervalued for their comparable work.

The problem only gets worse farther up along the corporate ladder, with women only accounting for a small percentage of C-level leadership and women of color an even smaller margin. Nevins added that female CEOs have only declined in the past few years, the most recent being PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi, who will be replaced by a man.

In order to fix these issues, Nevins says its important for companies to change their approach to hiring and promotions. For example, allowing for more flex time and paid family leave ensures that women can keep their jobs while still tending to children or elderly parents, a burden that they more often must shoulder than men.

Women can help advocate for themselves and their female coworkers by becoming more educated about comparable pay within their field, and using these statistics to leverage equal compensation if they feel their work is being undervalued.

“We aren’t saying women deserve a raise just because they’re women,” Nevin said. “We just believe everyone deserves comparable pay for comparable work.”