Today (April 28) is Equal Pay Day in the United States. The date of Equal Pay Day marks the additional amount of time an average woman in the U.S. must work to match the earnings of an average male worker from the previous year. Wait, think you just misread that? Then let me repeat it: to match the earnings of their male counterparts from 2008, women must work from January 2009 to April 2009.
In recognition of this inequality Equal Pay Day is also marked on a Tuesday in April. Tuesday happens to be the day on which women’s wages catch up to men’s wages from the previous week. Or to put it in another, equally depressing, way “on average, female workers have to put in more than six days of paid work to earn what men earn in five.”
While the wage gap in the United States is narrowing, among full time women workers during the first quarter of 2009, median weekly earnings were 79 percent those of men. According to Professor Nancy Folbre of the University of Massachusetts, what that means is that my pay for the previous week caught up to that of my male colleagues at 10:38 this morning…
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