July 27 is Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, but it does not celebrate that Black women earn what they are owed. We are far from that. Indeed, at our current pace of reform, we will have to wait over a century before Black Women’s Equal Pay marks wage justice for Black women.
This year, Black women will have to work over 19 months (into July) to make what men made in 2022. Census data confirms that Black women working full-time, year round make on average $.67 on the dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men. These comparative earnings shrink to $.64 on the dollar if we include part-time, migrant, and seasonal Black women workers. Black women are losing an average of $900,000 over their professional lives. This is the kind of money that fuels educational advancement, home ownership and intergenerational family wealth.
Many exploitative forces are at play, including discrimination, wage theft, suppression of labor organizing, caregiver discrimination and denied paid family leave. Another key driver of this wage gap is occupational segregation: the concentration of women—particularly women of color—in low paid and undervalued jobs. Black women are overrepresented in low-paid occupations and underrepresented in higher-wage jobs, which contributes to and exacerbates economic insecurity. Over four in 10 Black women (42 percent) make $15 per hour or less, compared to just 13 percent of white men. The figures are far worse in specific states. In Mississippi, for example, women...
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