LatinaLista — When it comes to the issue of equality, most people think that’s as dead an issue as racism. In other words, it used to exist but not anymore, right?
WRONG! (Same goes with racism too!)
Women work as hard as their male colleagues but still get paid less.
A new report by the Center for American Progress titled Lifetime Losses: The Career Wage Gap reveals:
- Women may lose $434,000 in income, on average, due to the career wage gap.
- Women at all education levels lose significant amounts of income due to the career wage gap, but women with the most education lose the most in earnings.
- Women with a college degree or higher lose $713,000 over a 40-year period versus a $270,000 loss for women who did not finish high school.
- Women in all occupations suffer from the career wage gap, but the gap ranges widely from one occupation to the next, with the widest gap in finance and management and the smallest gap in construction and maintenance.
- Women lose hundreds of thousands of dollars from the career wage gap no matter where they live.
- The gap exceeds $300,000 in 15 states, $400,000 in 22 states, and $500,000 in 11 states.
With the U.S. Census reporting that out of 12.9 million single parents raising children, 10.4 million are single mothers, wage discrepancies, which are worse for African American and Latino women, underscore the need for Congress to get serious about providing women fair and equal pay as their male colleagues.
That we must still wrestle with this issue at the end of 2008 illustrates how much farther we have to evolve as a society.
It’s just one more item on a growing list of policies that need to be changed when the Obama-Biden Administration take over the White House.
