A Black woman’s earnings show a societal lack of respect and appreciation for her
23rd August 2021 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
U.S. Census records show that on average, a Black woman makes $.63 to every dollar made by a non-Hispanic white man in a similar job. In terms of time, that means it would take a Black woman 19 months to make what a white man would in a year.
This stark disparity led to the creation of Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, which this year was Aug. 3. That date in 2021 marks the length of time, beginning Jan. 1, 2020, that a Black woman would need to earn as much as a white man did during calendar year 2020.
Earlier this month, Demos – a New York City-based think tank that focuses on a just, inclusive, multi-racial democracy – held an hour-long, online forum with new Demos president Taifa Smith Butler.
Butler, who spent the previous four years serving on the Demos Board of Trustees while working at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, engaged in a conversation with forum moderator Heather McGhee, an author and former Demos president, discussing the root causes of the Black women’s pay disparity, how the wage gap affects Black women and their families, and the potential positive impact achieving gender and racial pay equity would have on the economy as a whole.
Butler said at the base of the salary disparity between white men and Black women is a societal lack of respect and appreciation for Black women and the potential, economic and otherwise, they possess.
“What it highlights for me is this disparity and long-term undervaluing of Black women and their labor and their service and their nurturing,” Butler said.
She noted that in addition to the 63-cent-per dollar pay disparity, the inequity of the economy also means that over the course of a 40-year career, a Black woman will make nearly $1 million less than a white man over the same time span.
She said that severely inhibits the accumulation of intergenerational wealth in Black families, a stark reality that has a far-reaching, long-lasting, crippling impact on things like educational achievement and personal health, in addition to the financial challenges.
Butler said the political and social forces that contributed to such gender and racial disparities were in many ways codified in the United States in the 1930s and ‘40s, with the specific exclusion of women and people of color from the benefits offered by the New Deal and other government-sponsored social-uplift policies instituted before, during and after World War II.
Those exclusionary precedents, whether explicit, implied or in practice, served to bring form and parameters to the racial and gender bigotries that have existed in America for hundreds of years.
Butler noted how the growth and consolidation of corporate, and the establishment and persistence of public policy that continues to enrich wealthy corporations and the “1 percent” at the expense of everyone else, have only exacerbated the wealth and socioeconomic disparities facing people of color, including Black women.
McGhee agreed, adding that in research and writing by her and others, such barriers and handicaps confronting Black women also have a damaging effect on everyone else in America, where citizens remain economically interconnected and therefore depend on each other to achieve success.
Thus, she said that by hampering Black women’s ability to earn equitable pay, society is only hurting itself when it takes earning and spending power away from women to a significant degree, and she used the analogy of a sports team to illustrate.
“Black women’s [lack of] equal pay is obviously a problem for Black families and Black women,” McGhee said, “but it also suggests an economic model that is really zero sum. It’s this idea that it’s OK to have some of our best players on the sideline, saddled with debt and discrimination and disadvantage and not scoring points for our team. It’s this idea that we’re not really on the same team.
“[The wage gap] is over $1 trillion in lost economic output,” she added. “It should make common sense that we want all our players on the field scoring points. The more a Black woman is able to have equal pay for equal work, the more she’s buying food for her family, the more she’s investing in new businesses or paying for another year of college, that is all good for our economy, and that sense of mutual interest that we really need to have as a basis for collective action.”
However, both Butler and McGhee said that reaching such a point of mutual benefit spurred by gender and racial equity continues to be hindered by lingering societal myths that unfairly paint a Black woman’s lagging financial status on her own perceived failings and poor choices.
Butler and McGhee asserted that many of those fallacious beliefs – that Black women choose low-paying jobs or pursue useless majors in college, that single-parent homes struggle more financially, that Black women choose to live in “bad neighborhoods,” and simply that Black women don’t work hard enough – are factually dispelled by research and statistics.
For example, Butler noted that gender and racial pay gaps deter women across professions; just as such disparities are seen in cashiers or food servers, Black female surgeons usually make less than their white male counterparts in the operating room.
Butler said that Black women’s financial plight – and such corresponding issues as health and education – cannot be seen as their own fault. There’s much more to it, especially historical patterns and power structures that still exist.
“Just walk a mile in someone else’s shoes,” she said. “See the difficult choices [Black women] are making to advance their careers, to get higher education, but still be met with barrier after barrier around child care and the cost of it, having to spend more than 40 percent of their budget on child care just to go to work.
“They’re making so many tough choices,” Butler added. “‘Do I eat, do I have a roof over my head, do I take my child to a decent facility?’ Those are tough choices, and not everybody is put in that position.”
Such ideas are supported across the academic and research communities, including locally. Tulane Professor of Economics Gary Hoover agreed that bringing Black women’s pay in line with that of white males would benefit the whole country and its economy.
“It would absolutely be a boost for everyone,” Hoover told The Louisiana Weekly. “Don’t forget that women are not only employees but consumers. More monies in the hands of consumers could lead to more sales with a multiplier effect throughout the economy. Higher pay can also lead to firm and brand loyalty which also boosts the economy.”
And even beyond the financial ledger and economic common sense, Hoover said paying Black women equally is just the thing to do.
“Most importantly, the pay is deserved,” he said. “If Black women are doing the same job as competently as their male colleagues, then they need to be compensated as such. Firms will find that new areas of economic activity could be missed because they are not utilizing a vital part of their workforce. That alone should be motivation enough.”
Hoover said a fundamental change to corporate philosophy is desperately needed to address the pay disparities, including leveling the playing field by making sure that everyone in the company or industry has a complete, unfettered view of the field.
“More transparency in pay is a start,” he said. “Black women need to know where they stand exactly and not in the abstract in relation to their white peers. Also, we are taught that in economics, ‘incentives matter,’ thus, managers are engaging in this unequal pay distribution because their incentive structure is such that they can. Once we make the compensation of managers tied to their real and genuine efforts to close pay gaps, we’ll see them closed tomorrow.”
Advancement toward such measures might take a little prodding, however. During the Aug. 3 forum, Butler and McGhee said that the corporate world can’t be depended on to change its own structures and policies voluntarily from within.
“We can’t leave the system on its own to correct itself,” Butler said. “We’ve been waiting [too long] for corporations to be good actors, to be good corporate citizens, to pay people a fair and decent wage, a living wage so they can sustain their families and pursue their dreams and aspirations.
“We can’t wait for our corporate citizens to do the right thing. We need policy intervention, and that intervention must be intentional about righting the wrongs of the past. … With any solution we offer, we have to make sure it doesn’t perpetuate inequities across race and ethnicity, because if it does, it’s a racist policy.
“That’s the tough conversation we need to have with our governing policy makers, that there are a ton of problems that we have identified in our economy and in our democracy. Is there the political will to address these data that show that it takes 19 months for Black women to earn equal pay.”
This article originally published in the August 23, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
