Women's Equality Day - August 26th

Women’s Equality Day commemorates 26th August 1920 when votes to women officially became part of the US constitution. This day marks a turning point in the history of the struggle for equal treatment of women and women’s rights.

 

In 1920, the day stood for the result of 72 years of campaigning by a huge civil rights movement for women. Prior to movements like these, even respected thinkers such as Rousseau and Kant believed that woman’s inferior status in society was completely logical and reasonable; women were ‘beautiful’ and ‘not fit for serious employment’.

 

Over the last century, great women have proved these views wrong as the world has witnessed just what women are capable of achieving, from the likes of Rosa Parks and Eleanor Roosevelt fighting for civil rights and equality to great scientists such as Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin and Jane Goodall. The last century has shown more than ever what both women and men are capable of achieving, given the opportunity.

 

Today, women’s equality has grown to mean much more than just sharing the right to the vote. Organizations such as Equality Now and Womankind Worldwide continue to work to provide women across the globe with equal opportunities to education and employment, pushing against suppression and violence towards women and against the discrimination and stereotyping which still occur in every society.

 

So on Women’s Equality Day, let the men do the dishes and the women do the DIY, think about supporting women’s empowerment projects in developing countries, stop thinking about men and women as separate beings with separate roles and start thinking about treating people as equals.

 

Why are Women STILL Paid Less than Male Counterparts?

Pay discrimination is a silent offense. Women know when they’re being harassed and abused, of course, and they can often tell if they’re being discriminated against in hiring and promotion—all they have to do is count the men with lesser skills and credentials doing jobs they still aspire to. But in many workplaces, discussing pay is frowned upon; in some, it’s a dismissible offense. So, like Ledbetter, women often don’t know when they’re getting paid less than men. So they don’t complain. So the problem continues.

President Kennedy promised America would put a man on the moon and would stop pay discrimination against women. One of those happened. The Equal Pay Act that Kennedy signed in 1963 prohibited “discrimination on account of sex in the payment of wages by employers engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce.” Yet nearly half a century later, in the first three months of 2012, women still earned only 82.2 percent of what men earned. That’s comparing the “usual median weekly earnings” of full-time employees. Comparing annual pay of full-time, year-round workers, women earned only 77 percent of what men earned in 2010.
The latest hope for closing the gap died on June 5, when Senate Republicans filibustered a bill to make it easier for employees to share information about their pay. Three days later a federal judge in San Francisco said he was “seriously concerned” that lawyers for 45,000 female employees of Wal-Mart Stores in California haven’t shown enough evidence to file a sex-discrimination class action. There has been progress toward gender parity since Kennedy’s day, but for many women, not enough.

The gender pay gap, around 40¢ to the dollar in the early 1960s, shrank rapidly in the 1980s and early ’90s. It has narrowed by only 4¢ since 1994 and less than 1¢ since 2005, even though younger women have caught up to and surpassed men in education. What’s more, pay difference actually grows as a woman’s career progresses, adding up to hundreds of thousands of dollars on average over a lifetime. Catherine Hill, head of research at the American Association of University Women, found that among college graduates, the pay gap grew from 20¢ on the dollar one year after graduation to 31¢ by the 10th reunion.

Only some of the pay gap is the result of discrimination by employers. Men crowd into high-paying fields like engineering, while women dominate lower-paying fields like education and social service. And women are more likely than men to fall off the career track when they have children. They take time off and lose skills, or they opt for less-demanding jobs so they can spend more time at home. Most fathers, in contrast, manage to skate through parenthood without the slightest harm to their careers. Employers could offer family-friendlier policies on leave and flextime, but they can’t be blamed for dads who don’t do enough around the house.