Why Is The Pay For Black Women Still Falling Behind Years After The Women’s Rights Movement?

Nearly 200 years after the first women’s rights convention and more than 60 years after the landmark passage of the Equal Pay Act, Black women are still facing significant pay gaps for full-time and year-round work.

Black Women’s Equal Pay Day is celebrated annually on July 9 and serves to raise awareness about the wage gap that impacts Black women and their families. The date changes each year to represent how far into the year Black women must work to earn the same amount as white men in a year. 

Black women typically earn 66 cents on the dollar compared to non-Hispanic white men, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. This is due to the many barriers to achieving equal pay, including pay discrimination, occupational segregation, and racial and gender-based disparities in salaries, retirement savings and student loan debt, according to the National Organization for Women (NOW).

Pay disparities for Black women also vary significantly across states, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. The median annual earnings ratio for all Black women, including full- and part-time workers, ranges from 41.8 cents per dollar in Utah to 75.3 cents per dollar in Hawaii. Black women who worked full-time year-round earned 49.6 cents for every dollar a white man made in Louisiana and 74 cents per dollar in Hawaii.

According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, it will take more than 200 years – until 2227 – for Black women’s pay to equal white men’s for full-time year-round workers, and until 2362 to reach pay equity for all with earnings.

The National Women’s Law Center cites racism, sexism and structural inequalities as the driving factors that rob Black women and their families of tens of thousands of dollars every year. The wage gap will typically cost a Black woman working full time nearly $900,000 over a lifetime of work. Black women working full-time, year-round lose $1,843 every month, which equates to more than seven months of a family’s groceries, seven months of childcare and seven months of rent.

“The pay gap exists because we undervalue the work that women do and especially the work that Black women do,” Gaylynn Burroughs, vice president for education and workplace justice at The National Women’s Law Center, said in an interview with MSNBC. “What our moms told us has always been true: As Black girls we have to work twice as hard in order to get almost half as far.”

Minda Harts, author and host of the podcast “Secure the Seat,” told The Breakdown the key to closing the pay gap is pay transparency.

“I really think it’s incumbent upon companies and organizations right now to lean in and partner with Black women in the workplace and in order to do that I firmly believe companies need to normalize pay transparency,” she said.  “I think that will lead to the retaining, and recruiting, of Black women in the workplace.”

North Carolina State Rep. Alma Adams, who helps lead the Black Women’s Equal Pay Day Resolution, recalled her mother’s working experience on this year’s annual day of awareness.

“My mother cleaned houses and pinched every penny so I could be the first person in my family to go to college,” she wrote on Twitter. “I can only imagine what she’d have been able to accomplish had she been paid a fair wage.”

Among many calls for change, organizations have offered potential solutions and changes to pay structure to help eliminate the pay gap. The National Women’s Law Center advocates for strengthening equal pay laws so women are able to fight back against pay discrimination, improving wages for low-paid workers, increasing pay range transparency, protecting workers’ ability to unionize, and increasing the availability of high-quality affordable child care.

Similarly, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research calls on Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, which aims to combat wage discrimination based on sex, the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would codify the right to an abortion, and the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act, which would address the racial disparities in maternal health in the United States.