Research shows that on average, women make 79 cents for every $1 men make, and that the disparity is even wider for women of racial and ethnic minorities.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A half century after the Equal Pay Act of 1963 required men and women to be paid equally for performing the same work, women's wages still consistently lag behind men's paychecks, in Ohio and around the nation. Friday's forum at the City Club of Cleveland discussed both the reasons why and potential solutions for closing the wage gap.
The panel, moderated by Maxie C. Jackson III, station manager for 90.3 WCPN Ideastream, included: State Rep. Kathleen Clyde (D-Kent); Priyanka Chaudhry, a partner at EY; and Diane Bergeron, associate professor of organizational behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University.
Research shows that on average, women make 79 cents for every $1 men make, and that the disparity is even wider for women of racial and ethnic minorities.
African-American women make 64 cents for every $1 a white man makes, and 90 cents of what a black man makes, Bergeron said. Latina women make 56 cents of what a white man makes, and almost 90 percent of what a Latino man makes.
Clik here to view.
Maxie C. Jackson III, left, station manager for 90.3 WCPN Ideastream, asks Diane Bergeron, associate professor of organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management; Priyanka Chaudhry, partner at EY; and State Rep. Kathleen Clyde from Ohio's 7th District about the gender wage gap, at The City Club of Cleveland. Kathleen Clyde (D-Kent), who represents the 75th Ohio House District in Portage County, pointed out that Equal Pay Day, on April 12 this year, symbolizes that it takes women until mid-April to make what men made the previous year. It is always held on a Tuesday, to mark how much longer women have to work to get paid what male coworkers made the previous week.
And working-class women aren't the only ones who are feeling short-changed.
In March, five members of the U.S. women's national soccer team filed a wage-discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation, saying that even though their team had won three World Cups and four Olympic championships, they were paid only 40 percent of what male players were making.
More recently, Robin Wright of Netflix's "House of Cards" said she insisted she be paid the same as her co-star Kevin Spacey, saying, "''You better pay me or I'm going to go public.' And they did," the Los Angeles Times reported.
Some people say women earn less because they don't negotiate their starting salaries the way their male colleagues do, or because of the career they choose.
Not exactly, Bergeron said. When identical resumes were submitted with male and female names at the top, the one from "John" was more likely to get hired and was offered a higher starting salary than the one from "Jane."
Even worse, bias in the workplace exists at almost every level, determining how people are evaluated, how people are rewarded, and who gets promoted, she said.
Even controlling for education, job type or stage in career, "the gap persists, no matter what we're looking at," Bergeron said. Even worse, "the pay gap is even greater when you talk about women of color, and that is institutional racism, along with sexism."
Being paid 5 percent to 7 percent less might not seem like much, but it can add up to nearly $600,000 over the course of someone's career, Bergeron said.
Even at the CEO level, the raw wage gap is 31 percent to 32 percent. "Even when women decide to go into [male-dominated] fields, by mid-career, 50 percent of them have decided to leave, citing very a hostile or machismo work environment it's not comfortable to be in."
Others say it's because women are more likely to stay home as full-time mothers or as caregivers of other family members, or to take jobs with fewer hours and more flexibility -- "choices that men don't have to make," Jackson noted.
Clik here to view.
A City Club of Cleveland panel on leaning in and getting paid featured Ohio State Rep. Kathleen Clyde, D-Kent. State Rep. Kathleen Clyde (D-Kent), who represents the 75th Ohio House District in Portage County, and State Rep. Stephanie Howse (D-Cleveland) last fall proposed House Bill 330, the Ohio Equal Pay Act.
In Ohio, women make only 77 cents for every dollar a man makes, Clyde said. "We have a lot of work to do."
Her proposal would: 1.) prohibit employers from retaliating against employees for talking about their salaries; 2.) require businesses that do business with the State of Ohio to certify that they pay men and women equally, and 3.) ask Ohio governmental entities to assess their pay scales for male and female employees.
When a similar study was done in Minnesota, women received an average increase of 9 percent, or about $2,200 more annually, she said. "I think it's time for us to have equal pay in the State of Ohio."
Clyde said she is encouraged that Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley is promoting paid leave and that the City of Cleveland is raising the minimum wage, because that will bring women out of poverty and help close the wage gap. "To me, every woman deserves equal pay, whether she's at a Fortune 500 company or a small business."
Conducting an in-house gender equity study "is only going to increase the trust of employees that their organization is looking out for them," Bergeron said.
Priyanka Chaudhry said a recent study of 22,000 companies in 91 countries by the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that offering fathers 11 days of paid parental leave has a greater impact on employee retention, because it challenges the idea that only new mothers need time off with their newborns. EY offers 16 weeks of paid leave to all new parents, regardless of gender or how they became parents, she said.
Other research has found that companies where 30 percent of the executives are women have 6 percent higher margins than companies where all the executives are men. "It's not about getting one lone woman to the top," but about changing corporate cultures, and having managers who acknowledge and are wiling to tackle their conscious and unconscious biases, she said.
Jackson asked: "What about this notion that men prefer pay increases whereas women prefer flexibility?"
"I don't know that women prefer flexibility as much as women need flexibility," Bergeron said, as the mostly female City Club audience broke out in applause. Even in two-income families, she said, women are the ones predominantly responsible for running the household, and need the time and flexibility to do that.
Jackson pointed out that women are often blamed for making poor choices to go in to less lucrative fields.
Bergeron said that when the American Association of University Women looked at the wage gap a year after college, it found that "all but 7 percent of the gap could be explained by the choices men and women had made about what careers to go into.
When one graduate goes into a male-dominated field like petroleum engineering that averages $120,000 a year, while the other pursues a field like counseling or psychology that averages $29,000 a year, they already start out with widely different income potentials. And it doesn't help that the women-dominated helping professions like teaching and nursing are undervalued and underpaid.
Chaudhry said mid-career is when a lot of women decide to step back or even step out of the workplace to become caregivers.
Jackson closed the conversation by asking each of the women to offer a word of advice on creating a more equitable workplace. Chaudry said to start a conversation about why women are consistently paid less than men.
Bergeron said: "Read Sheryl Sandberg's 'Lean In.' She cites all the relevant research" on the topic. She said each workplace has its rules, but there are always also a set of informal rules that govern what is possible in that office. "Look at the top of your organization. If there's no one who looks like you, is it really the place you want to be?"
And Clyde said not only do Ohio legislators need to pass House Bill 330, "We need to support candidates and elected leaders who care about closing the pay gap," at the local city council, state, and national levels. "You really need to keep all leaders accountable."
"From the presidency on down, having women in government is critical," she said. "Ohio's never had a woman governor, a women senator, we've never had a woman president. We need more women in elected office advocating and making these policy changes."