March 25 is Equal Pay Day, the date calculated to be the point where women’s earnings catch up to what men earned in the previous year.
It’s a stark reminder of how far women still have to go to close gender and race-based pay gaps, and what NOW members can do to bring about gender equity in the workplace.
For the first time in 20 years, the pay gap widened in 2023. Women working full-time, year-round were paid 83 cents for every dollar paid to men, compared to 84 cents in 2022, and Black women were set back at disproportionate rates—with Black women working full-time, year-round earning 66 cents for every dollar White, non-Hispanic men make. Native American women as well as Latina women earn 58 cents compared to White men.
NOW members know that women continue to be underpaid and undervalued and that the protections we’ve won over the years to protect our economic civil rights are under renewed attack. Here’s a toolkit from Equal Pay Today to help raise awareness about the wage gap and its impact on women and their families.
We need public policies that give women the same freedom and opportunities to rise in their careers, something that men have long been able to count on, thanks to the unpaid care work performed by women.
These include the Paycheck Fairness Act, which protect workers from retaliation for discussing pay, banning the use of prior salary history, and codifying pay data collection, the Healthy Families Act, to provide employees the right to earn job-protected time off when they or their loved ones are sick, hurt, or getting medical care, as well as for needs in connection with sexual or domestic violence, and the FAMILY Act, to ensure that every worker, no matter the size of their employer or if they are self-employed or part-time, has access to paid leave to care for a family member following a serious medical event.
And NOW members are standing up to President Trump’s unprecedented attacks on our independent civil rights enforcement agencies that protect workers. We oppose the gutting of our civil rights laws and attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion programs that open doors and build bridges.
Congress passed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, but the needle has barely moved. When the Equal Pay Act was passed, full-time working women were paid 59 cents on average for every dollar paid to men. This means that it’s taken 62 years for the wage gap to close just 24 cents. According to this analysis from the Center for American Progress,
“If the gender wage gap continues on the same path it took from 2000 to 2023, it would take until 2068 for it to close for women working full time, year-round.”
That’s too long to wait. We need to erase Equal Pay Day from the calendar. That’s why NOW will always fight raise awareness about the wage gap for women and advocate for the policies we need to protect women’s economic security.