By Maya Dusenbery • @mayadusenbery • 11 years ago

Today we’re “celebrating” Equal Pay Day

Businesspeople holding piggybanks.It’s that time again–the day when we take stock of how little the gender pay gap as budged in recent years. Thanks to the gap, it takes until today, April 9th, for the average woman in the US to work enough to earn as much as the average man earned in 2012. And while the pay gap is 77 cents to the dollar overall, the figures for women of color are even worse:

  • Black women earn 64 cents to each dollar for white men.
  • Hispanic women earn 55 cents to each dollar for white men.
  • Asian women earn 87.6 cents to each a dollar for white men.

While you’re seething, you can thank the Republicans in Congress for blocking the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would protect workers who discuss their salaries and create stricter penalties for pay discrimination. And be sure to check out these 7 steps we should take to close the gap. I’d like to add an 8th: How about women go on strike from start of the year until Equal Pay Day? I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t mind coming off a 3-month vacation boycott right about now.

Image via.

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

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