Today is Mom’s Equal Pay Day.
Working to support their families and also putting in more hours caring for children and doing housework, mothers make an average of $.58 dollar to the dollar paid to fathers.
These statistics reflect and perpetuate stereotypes about women being less capable and less committed to their work. They are financially penalized in the workplace based on their sex and race (and also disability status, gender presentation, and sexual orientation) while also expected to take on disproportionate caretaking without pay.
At the get-go, employers may view a female applicant as someone who won’t stay on the job or give it her all because of an assumed capacity to get pregnant, which could lead to the need to leave work to care for children.
Yet, female applicants should be concerned about their employers’ plans for the future than the other way around. If they get the job, they will likely lack the support that other industrialized countries provide to working parents.
The U.S. is the only one of the countries with the largest economies that does not provide paid leave. Women are still primary caregivers in the home, but they can stay on the job and maintain their income if they have access to paid family and medical leave.
Similarly, the U.S. fails to provide universal child care. The level of available care is woefully inadequate and the cost of child care is prohibitive, pushing mothers out of the workforce.
During the first years of the pandemic, we saw how the lack of social supports in the United States uniquely affected mothers. Mothers lost jobs and those with school-age children were forced to stop working or look for work at a huge economic cost.
Women make up the majority of minimum pay workers, which at $7.25 an hour, pays far below a living wage in Pennsylvania. Women, and particularly women of color, would benefit significantly from an increase in the minimum wage. Women are also deprived of higher paid jobs through job segregation and are sometimes pushed out of higher paid jobs by a hostile environment, sexual harassment, and pregnancy discrimination in the form of denying temporary, reasonable accommodations.
As a result, even mothers working full-time, year-round get paid $. 83 as compared to the dollar paid to a father. But many mothers want but cannot work full-time year-round, in part due to unpaid caretaking obligations. The real gap must be measured by looking at what all mothers and fathers are being paid.
Women of color have been systematically undervalued and undercompensated and face the widest gap in pay, and are more likely to be breadwinners and to bear the majority of caretaking at home. Nationwide, for every dollar a White, non-Hispanic father makes, American Indian & Alaska Native moms make $0.37 cents, Latina moms just $0.39 cents, and Black moms $0.46 cents.
To close the wage gaps for mothers, the U.S. must strengthen equal pay laws, enforce anti-discrimination laws, increase the minimum wage, provide universal paid leave and paid sick days as well as quality accessible child-care, and protect pregnant workers in the workplace.
Take Action!
The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) would close loopholes for pregnant workers requesting reasonable accommodations. We recently called on Senator Casey, the sponsor and champion of this legislation, to work with Senate leadership to get this over the finish line. This #MomsEqualPay Day let your Senators know this isn’t something that can wait. Every day, pregnant workers are being forced to choose between their income and their health.
Use this link to Tweet at your Senators & ask them to support the PWFA or email Senator Casey here.
Women’s Law Project is a public interest law center in Pennsylvania devoted to advancing and defending the rights of women, girls, and LGBTQ+ people in Pennsylvania and beyond. As a non-profit organization, we can not do this work without you. Please consider supporting our work.
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