What would you do with $11,000? Women today earn, on average, just .77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That adds up to approximately $11,000 per year. The wage gap isn’t shrinking. Women’s pay for equal work has been holding at .77 cents since at least 2005. In 1963, when President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, women earned just .60 cents for every dollar a man earned. When he signed the legislation, Kennedy remarked, “Our economy today depends upon women in the labor force…It is extremely important that adequate provision be made for reasonable levels of income to them, for the care of the children which they must leave at home or in school, and for protection of the family unit.” And yet in fifty years we’ve only gained .17 cents. In 2009, when President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act he stated, “In this economy, when so many folks are already working harder for less and struggling to get by, the last thing they can afford is losing part of each month’s paycheck to simple discrimination.” And yet the gap remains the same four years later. And that gap is even greater for [...]
