How to Attack the Gender Wage Gap? Speak Up
By JESSICA BENNETT via The New York Times
December 15, 2012
ANNIE HOULE, grandmother of seven, holds up a stack of pink dollar bills.
A workshop at the College of Mount St. Vincent in the Bronx dealt with the many issues of the gender pay gap — and offered ways for women to negotiate about salary. Sain Mota, a participant, answered a question during the session.
“How many of you know about the wage gap?” she asks a roomful of undergraduates, almost all of them women, at theCollege of Mount St. Vincent in the Bronx.
A few hands go up.
“Now, how many of you worry about being able to afford New York City when you graduate?”
The room laughs. That’s a given.
Ms. Houle is the national director of a group called the WAGE Project, which aims to close the gender pay gap. She explains that her dollar bills represent the amounts that women will make relative to men, on average, once they enter the work force.
Line them up next to a real dollar, and the difference is stark: 77 cents for white women; 69 cents for black women. The final dollar — so small that it can fit in a coin purse, represents 57 cents, for Latina women. On a campus that is two-thirds women, many have heard these numbers before. Yet holding them up next to one another is sobering.
“I’m posting this to Facebook,” one woman says.
One of three male students in the room is heading to the photocopier to make copies for his mother.
Another woman in the group sees a triple threat. “This is crazy,” Dominique Remy, a senior studying communications, says, holding the pink cutouts in her hand. “What if I’m all of them? My mother is Latina. My father is Haitian. I’m a woman.” Read full article>>