My Gender Shouldn’t Affect My Paycheck

As a young woman about to acquire a master’s degree and head out into a workforce beleaguered by recession and high unemployment, the gender wage gap weighs heavily on my mind. Why, after obtaining an equal education and entering the same job markets, should I make less money than my male friends? The answer is, of course, that I shouldn’t.

But 48 years after the Equal Pay Act became law and two years after the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was signed, women entering the exact same jobs with the exact same education as men are still paid 5 percent less, a gap that only increases across sectors and throughout our lifetimes.

Luckily for me and other women in the workforce, the current economic situation has turned the spotlight onto the critical need for fair pay more than ever before. Last week, Women’s Policy Inc., in cooperation with Reps. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Gwen Moore (D-WI) and the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, sponsored an event aimed at highlighting the impact of the gender wage gap on women and families and proposing possible solutions for achieving equal pay.

Lisa Maatz, AAUW’s director of public policy and government relations, spoke at the event. An expert on fair pay, Maatz expressed her confidence that the United States is on the cusp of major breakthroughs for women and their paychecks. Defining fair pay as a bipartisan issue, she emphasized that both legislative and extra-legislative steps are needed to close the wage gap between men and women. Maatz stated that in addition to passing legislation, federal and state agencies can actively support equal pay in the private sector by using existing resources to provide technical assistance, collect data on best practices, and properly fund equal pay enforcement organizations. She also said that increasing women’s and girls’ participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields is a critical step toward closing the gender wage gap.

Warning that the so-called “man-cession” is too quickly becoming a “he-covery” focused on finding jobs for men, Maatz declared that now more than ever is the critical time to ensure women have equal access and equal pay to support their careers, their families, their households, and the entire economy.

As a young woman who would prefer to start her career without an automatic encumbrance based solely on gender, I couldn’t agree more.

If you want to take action on closing the wage gap and other issues important to women, sign up for the AAUW Action Network.

This post was written by Public Policy Intern Katie Donlevie.