AAUW Member Brings Fight for Pay Equity to TV

AAUW member Nancy Jones

AAUW member Nancy Jones brought the gender pay gap into Virginia residents’ living rooms. Next up, she’s bringing the issue to their universities.

Jones, a 10-year member of the AAUW Portsmouth (VA) Branch, dove into AAUW’s pay equity data when she became her branch’s public policy chair two years ago. Last year’s Equal Pay Day efforts included two letters to the editor. This year, Jones wanted to be more proactive, and she wanted reach.

She found the statistics on African American women’s lagging pay so appalling that she sought to showcase the data through a program on her local public television station, WHRO-TV. The program, called Another View, highlights issues that affect the Hampton Roads, Virginia, African American community.

“It just occurred to me that it would be a good format for talking about the pay gap because it’s an issue that’s even more important for black women,” Jones says. “There’s such greater discrepancy.”

According to AAUW’s The Simple Truth about the Gender Pay Gap, white women’s weekly median earnings in 2010 were 80 percent of what white men earned.

Jones pitched the pay equity idea to the program’s host, Barbara Hamm Lee, at a dinner earlier this year. Hamm Lee began the episode, which aired March 18, by thanking Jones.

Jones says her favorite part of the program, which featured two Old Dominion University professors, was the attention it drew to the fact that the pay gap can begin immediately if women don’t negotiate.

“It’s also important to realize that it’s never a done deal,” Jones says. “You still have opportunities to negotiate. Just because you started out on the lower end of the pay scale doesn’t mean that you’ll have to stay there forever.”

Tomorrow, on Equal Pay Day, Jones’ branch will set up a table at the Portsmouth campus of Tidewater Community College. They plan to give out popcorn — more to men than women to help them understand the gap — and make a poster so that women can write down what they would do with the extra money if they were paid fairly.

Jones will also participate in training tomorrow to learn how to lead a $tart $mart salary negotiation workshop, a campus program that AAUW offers in partnership with the WAGE Project. The training will be paired with a workshop that teaches Old Dominion students wage gap facts and salary negotiation skills. Jones and another Portsmouth branch member will be trained so that they can host future workshops, likely starting in the fall.

Jones retired nine years ago and says pay equity wasn’t an issue for her, but the statistics — and her two granddaughters — were more than enough for her to make Equal Pay Day a top priority. What are you doing tomorrow to make a difference?

This post was written by AAUW Communications Fellow Elizabeth Owens.