Event Highlights Gender Discrepancies in Wage Gap
Hannah Gore ’18 / The Dickinsonian
From left to right: Margot Abrahams ’17, Angelica Mishra ’19, Maddie Jones ’19, Katherine Barter ’20
This year, in preparation for Equal Pay Day, the Dickinson chapter of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) hosted an event on Britton Plaza to educate attendees about the importance of equal pay between women and men.
2017’s national Equal Pay Day was Tuesday, April 4, a day that symbolizes the point in the year to which women must work to make the same amount of money as men did the previous calendar year. According to data provided by the AAUW from the U.S. Census Bureau, white women who work full-time only make 80 cents for every dollar a man makes. However, this number changes for minority groups. The AAUW reports that among Hispanic and Latina women, the difference is the largest, with only 54 cents to every dollar. According to Angelica Mishra ’19, secretary of the Dickinson chapter, the difference is 63 cents among African American women, 60 cents among Native American women, and 90 cents among Asian American women.
For some students, this event provided a new and eye-opening perspective. For example, Brooks Hamilton ’20 was not previously aware of Equal Pay Day, but the event resonated with her.
“I feel like we’re well into 2017, and it’s just very discouraging to think that women working up until today will have just made as much as a man would have.” She further emphasized the event’s educational benefits, stating, “I’m all for equal pay, but I didn’t even know that Equal Pay Day was even a thing, so that’s awesome.”
Although AAUW has been an organization since 1881, the Dickinson chapter only started in 2015. When AAUW president and founder Margot Abrahams ’17 saw the AAUW informative display set up by Becky Hamell, associate vice president for Student Leadership & Campus Engagement, she immediately felt drawn towards the organization.
“I really connected to its message and was like ‘Wow, this is what I love to do,’” she said. “I’m a women and gender studies major as well, so it was really exciting for me to see how I can use what I’ve been learning at Dickinson the past two years to kind of facilitate conversations and programming on campus.” She reported that approximately 50 students normally attend AAUW events, coming from a variety of backgrounds and majors.
“It appeals to so many different interests and issues. Really whatever you’re interested in you can lobby for via AAUW.”
Although the organization is only a year old, it has already gained recognition through its Gateway to Equity Award, which, according to the AAUW Pennsylvania website, “honors an individual, group or organization that has shown by action or philosophy the promotion of the AAUQ mission of equity for women and girls…”
Abrahams hopes that Dickinson can continue encouraging more leaders and involvement through AAUW in the future while maintaining an inclusive approach. “We said we wanted AAUW to be a club that wasn’t isolated,” she explained while describing the organization’s goals. “We’ve really been able to do that. So, that’s been a big accomplishment.”
The event, which was held on Monday, April 3 from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. was run primarily by Abrahams, Mishra, Vice President Maddie Jones ’19, and member Katherine Barter ’20. According to the Carlisle AAUW website, carlisle-pa.aauw.net, the group is an organization that aims to advance women’s equality through involvement in advocacy.
MaleMatters • Apr 7, 2017 at 11:34 am
Let’s take a look at how far off the mark this is:
-The national War Labor Board mandated in World War I that if women must undertake work normally done by men, they should earn equal pay for that work
-President Einsenhower’s equal-pay urging in his 1956 State of the Union Address
-The 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act
-Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act
-The 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act
-Affirmative action (created for blacks but has benefited mostly white women, the group most vocal about the wage gap – tinyurl.com/74cooen)
-The 1991 amendments to Title VII
-The 1991 Glass Ceiling Commission created by the Civil Rights Act
-The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act
-The Age Discrimination in Employment Act
-The Americans with Disability Act (Title I)
-Workplace diversity
-The countless state and local laws and regulations
-The thousands of company mentors for women
-The horde of overseers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
-TV’s and movies’ last three decades of casting women as thoroughly integrated into the world of work (even in the ultra-macho world of spying, James Bond’s boss is a woman)
-The National Labor Relations Act
-The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, signed into law by President Obama in 2009, after he campaigned repeatedly on a promise to close the gender wage gap, but failed even though for his first two years of his presidency the Democrats controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives
-The 2010 National Equal Pay Enforcement Task Force
-It is highly likely that the 2016 EEO-1 report, which begins collecting summary pay data, will join this list of failed measures.
Women’s advocates insist employers everywhere pay women less than men for doing exactly the same work in the exact same occupations and careers, working side-by-side with men on the same job for the same organization, working the same number of hours per week, traveling the same amount of time for work obligations, with the same exact work experience and education, with exactly the same level of productivity.
Yet these advocates also seem to think employers’ prime modus operandi is greed. (“Corporate greed” may be one of the Left’s more salient rallying calls.) Thus they no doubt believe employers would hire only illegal immigrants for their lower labor cost if they could get away with it (many do get away with it), or would move their business to a cheap-labor country to save money, or would replace old workers with young ones for the same reason.
So why do these same advocates think employers would NOT hire only women if, as they say, employers DO get away with paying females at a lower rate than males for the same work?
Many of America’s most sophisticated women choose to earn less than their male counterparts:
“Female physicians worked about 5 hours fewer per week than their male counterparts through age 54….” https://www.aamc.org/download/426242/data/ihsreportdownload.pdf?cm_mmc=AAMC-_-ScientificAffairs-_-PDF-_-ihsreport
“In 2011, 22% of male physicians and 44% of female physicians worked less than full time, up from 7% of men and 29% of women from Cejka’s 2005 survey.” ama-assn.org/amednews/2012/03/26/bil10326.htm
“…[O]nly 35 percent of women who have earned MBAs after getting a bachelor’s degree from a top school are working full time.” It “is not surprising that women are not showing up more often in corporations’ top ranks.” http://malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/why-women-are-leaving-the-workforce-in-record-numbers/
“Compared to men, women view professional advancement as equally attainable, but less desirable” http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/15/1502567112.full.pdf
See the real reasons the wage gap hasn’t closed after thousands of measures over many decades:
“Salary Secrecy — Discrimination Against Women?” http://malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2014/10/27/salary-secrecy-discrimination-against-women/
“If Iceland’s So Gender Equal, Then Why Has It Such A Large Gender Pay Gap?”
https://malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2017/04/05/if-icelands-so-gender-equal-then-why-has-it-such-a-large-gender-pay-gap/
PS:
Liberals’ persistent, politically motivated distortion of the gender wage gap has, I believe, resulted in this:
“Republicans don’t have near as big a woman problem as Democrats have a man problem.” WSJ
http://www.wsj.com/articles/kim-strassel-america-is-war-on-women-weary-1412900814
And this:
“The whole Democratic Party is now a smoking pile of rubble: In state government things are worse, if anything. The GOP now controls historical record number of governors’ mansions, including a majority of New England governorships. Tuesday’s election swapped around a few state legislative houses but left Democrats controlling a distinct minority. The same story applies further down ballot, where most elected attorneys general, insurance commissioners, secretaries of state, and so forth are Republicans.” http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/10/13576488/democratic-party-smoking-pile-rubble