Category: politics

AAUW Equal Pay Calendar

2023 Equal Pay Days

• Equal Pay Day—representing all women—is March 14. Women working full-time, year-round are paid 84 cents and all earners (including part-time and seasonal) are paid 77 cents for every dollar paid to men. 
• LGBTQIA+ Equal Pay Awareness Day is June 15. Without enough data to make calculations, this day raises awareness about the wage gap experienced by LGBTQIA+ folks. 
• Black Women’s Equal Pay Day is July 27. Black women working full-time, year-round are paid 67 cents and all earners (including part-time and seasonal) are paid 64 cents for every dollar paid to non-Hispanic white men. 
• Moms’ Equal Pay Day is August 15. Moms working full-time, year-round are paid 74 cents and all earners (including part-time and seasonal) are paid 62 cents for every dollar paid to dads. 
• Latina’s Equal Pay Day is October 5. Latinas women working full-time, year-round
• are paid 57 cents and all earners (including part-time and seasonal) are paid 54 cents for every dollar paid to non-Hispanic white men. 
• Native Women’s Equal Pay Day is November 30. Native women working full-time, year-round are paid 57 cents and all earners (including part-time and seasonal) are paid 51 cents for every dollar paid to non-Hispanic white men. 
• Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Women’s Equal Pay Day is TBD. Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women working full-time, year-round are paid 92 cents and all earners (including part-time and seasonal) are paid 80 cents for every dollar paid to non-Hispanic white men.

Thanks so much to the American Association of University Women for the above images and information they provided on this significant component of Women’s History Month in 2023.

And thanks to Brazilian illustrator Camila Pinheiro for designing the 2023 US Open Tennis Tournament poster celebrating 50 years of equal prize money for men and women, featuring one of the leaders associated with that seismic achievement in 1973: Billie Jean King. A mere twenty-eight years later the Australian Open awarded equal prize money for men and women beginning in 2001, another six years passed before Wimbledon followed suit in February, 2007; Roland-Garros quickly followed Wimbledon in March, 2007 – thirty-four years after the US Open adopted the equal prize money policy for women and men in the sport all four Majors participated in the policy that became the first Grand Slam of pay equity for all players.

“UnEqual” pay was the powder keg that ignited my activism in the women’s movement of the 1970s. From a nontraditional career for women in the accounting profession that began in 1967 with the shocking discovery that my compensation of $650 monthly at the Houston office of Arthur Andersen & Co., one of the most prestigious international accounting firms at the time, was $250 less than a work buddy making $900 a month for the same job. Only difference according to the partner in charge of personnel at the firm when I confronted him: my friend was a guy who might have a family to support one day. The risk for me, according to Mr. Terrell, was the need for maternity leave.

I wasn’t bold enough at the time to tell him why that was an unlikely scenario; I was, however, angry enough to leave the firm. This was my first job in the real world following graduation from the University of Texas at Austin, my first personal introduction to discrimination by men in power who had no respect for women in the workplaces they controlled, my first feelings of being lesser than despite high academic achievements and even higher work ethics. At twenty-two years of age, I was born again – this time as an activist for equal pay.

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Slava Ukraini. For the women.