recently wrote a on women’s wages compared to men’s. A lot of you probably remember the buttons from the late 70s and early 80s that said "$0.69" — the amount, at the time, that women earned for every dollar earned by a man in the same job.
Since then, we made progress. Slow, small progress, but progress, until sometime in the mid-1990s, when we hit $0.75.
However, according to Estrich, more recent trends are cause for concern:
According to U.S. Labor Department data, women with college degrees who are between 36 and 45 earned 74.7 cents on the dollar last year, down a penny from 10 years ago.
Women with high school educations are still making 75% of what their male peers make, which is obviously less than what most of us with college degrees earn, but the whole picture is ugly.
The fact that we’re losing ground really took me by surprise. I assumed that, since the 1970s and the "$0.69" buttons, we’d been slowly creeping towards equality. I didn’t think we were there yet, but I would have guessed that we were in the high 80s, not less than 75 percent.
What I really find distressing and hard to think about in all of this, though, is the implications for lesbian families. Are we going to be able to afford things like college tuition etc at the same rate as straight families? How could we?
Let’s do some simple math with two hypothetical couples: Mr. and Mrs. Straight each college educated. To keep the math simple, Mr. Straight makes $100,000 per year. He and Mrs Straight met in college, with the same major and similar grades. She earns Estrich’s average of 74.7 percent of what he earns, or $74,700, for a combined household income of $174,700. (I never said we were feeling sorry for the couples in this example.)
The second couple — Mrs. and Mrs. Lesbos — actually went to college with the Straights. They all hung out and studied together. Mrs. and Mrs. Lesbos each earn $74,700, for a combined household income of $149,400, which turns out to be only 85.5 percent of the Lesbos’ household income. (Still a nice income, but is the lesbian really worth 14.5 percent less than the heterosexual couple?)
Over time, this problem gets worse. If the Straights were to save that money every year for 10 years, even if they only earned 4 percent interest on it (a very conservative figure), at the end of the 10 years they would have $353,354 more than their lesbian friends. In 20 years at 5 percent interest, the heterosexual couple is up almost a million dollars: $945,525.
That’s a lot of tutors, summer camps, college education, special coaches or classes, unpaid internships funded by parents, etc.
Over the course of a 40 year career, using the for the stock market between 1892 - 1997, 7 percent, Mrs. and Mrs. Lesbos will have $5,783,175 less than the Straights.
I know that they wouldn’t all be earning the same salary over all that time, but trying to figure out the math on that is more than I’m up to right now. And the easy math still makes the point. I suspect that the real world version would actually be more dramatic because Mr. Straight’s numbers would keep getting further apart from his wife’s and Mrs. and Mrs. Lesbos’.
Estrich makes two general suggestions for addressing the pay gap:
But there are two obvious answers to this — other than passive acceptance, that is. One is to look hard at the pay scales, and recognize that part of the reason certain specialties make less is not because they’re easier or less important, or even require less training, but because there are more women doing them. Another is to recruit more women to the high-paying ones.
On a societal level, sure. But easier said than done. On a "but what about my family" level — kinda empty.
What do you think we should do?
Liza Barry-Kessler’s blog can be found at www.lizawashere.com.
–
It’s that time of the year when we all look ahead with hope and optimism and make our resolutions and pledges for the coming year. Inevitably, we vow to lose weight, get that promotion at the office, be more caring partners, keep up the yard, take out the trash regularly, call our family more often and just all in all be better people.
Herer are share some of my wishes for the gay and lesbian community for 2007. Some of the things on my wish list are personal some are universal and some are light-hearted jabs at this thing we call the gay and lesbian community, that little enclave we’ve come together to create in hopes of making a better world than where most of us came from.
Whatever’s on your wish list, I wish you luck and happiness in working to achieve it this coming year.
I wish gay men and lesbians saw more of the things they have in common rather than the things that separate them.
I wish Hillary would do the right thing and refrain from mounting a presidential campaign.
I wish the Republicans would finally see that their real “base” is not the wacky right wing.
I wish I wasn’t still so enamored with the last man who broke my heart.
I wish men would quit breaking my heart.
I wish all closeted gay politicians, including Fla. Gov. Charlie Crist, would come out.
I wish there were half the gay bars and twice the gay book reading clubs.
I wish there wasn’t so much attitude in the gay community.
I wish gay men would hook up before 3 a.m.
I wish gay men would talk about something other than what body part they worked out at the gym today and what happened to the price of their real estate this month.
I wish the real estate market would rebound.
I wish I didn’t know by heart the measurement of every one of my body parts.
I wish I had bigger arms.
And a bigger chest.
I wish we still didn’t feel the need to bury ourselves in gay ghettos.
I wish my neighborhood would turn gay.
I wish we weren’t occupying a foreign country.
I wish the media would tell us how many Iraqi civilians are dying in Iraq as frequently as they tell us how many American soldiers die there.
I wish no one were dying in Iraq.
I wish that we won’t leave Iraq too early and let the situation deteriorate into a civil war.
I wish gay guys would stop wearing their collars turned up. It didn’t look good the first time around back in the ’80s.
I wish gay society wasn’t so youth-obsessed.
I wish I was about 10 years younger.
I wish gay men valued the size of each other’s hearts and intellects as much as we value the size of each other’s penises.
I wish the right guy would call me “Daddy.”
I wish guys wouldn’t start conversations online with the word, “stats?”
I wish I spent less time online.
I wish the men I wanted to have sex with were the same ones I wanted to date.
I wish I got asked out on dates.
I wish we’d find the cure for AIDS.
I wish gay men would stop barebacking and putting ourselves at risk.
I wish gay and lesbian relationships weren’t treated as second class. I wish we had the simple right to get married.
I wish gay and lesbian people understood why we need to continue our fight for marriage, even if it makes us unpopular with some voters.
I wish I had somebody to marry.
I wish you all the best in 2007.
–
I had a chance to see a personal hero of mine last night, and she inspired me like I knew she would. Maya Angelou, the Renaissance Woman — author, playwright, poet, actress, civil rights activist — read aloud her new poem “A Pledge to Rescue Our Youth” at the 15th Annual “A King Celebration Concert” by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra held at the Martin Luther King Jr. Chapel at Morehouse College.
The poem was meaningful, written specifically for young men and women of color, imploring them to “Come up from the gloom of national neglect, you have already been paid for./ Come out of the shadow of irrational prejudice, you owe no racial debt to history.”
To tell the truth, Dr. Angelou could read a set of Mapquest directions and I’d get chill bumps. Her voice itself is so commanding. But the woman uses it for good. And while the night belonged to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, who died a year ago, I knew she also spoke for me, a lesbian.
Dr. Angelou spoke about the “rainbow in the clouds,” a lyric from an African-American slave song. If you put something shiny and beautiful in a dark place, than hope will always be alive, she said.
Well, we all know the rainbow is our symbol, although some fundamental Christians want to “take it back.” So I decided in my mind that, yes, our rainbow symbol and we as queer people must continue to provide hope for others by shining, even during dark moments in our lives and history.
Dr. Angelou is famous for her quotes as well, and many notable ones include speaking on behalf of gays.
“I will not sit in a group of black friends and hear racial pejoratives against whites. I will not hear ‘honky.’ I will not hear ‘Jap.’ I will not hear ‘kike.’ I will not hear ‘greaser.’ I will not hear ‘dago.’ I will not hear it. As soon as I hear it, I say, ‘Excuse me, I have to leave. Sorry. Or if it’s in my home, I say, ‘You have to leave. I can’t have that. That is poison, and I know it is poison, and you’re smearing it on me. I will not have it,” she said in an interview with the .
She went on to say in the interview that people must have the courage to stand up to people who belittle others they perceive as different.
“Sooner or later, you’ll be able to say out loud, ‘Just a minute. I defend that person. I will not have gay bashing, lesbian bashing. Not in my company. I will not do it.’"
When Mrs. King died, the mainstream media hardly mentioned in news articles and obituaries her dedication to gay rights and to ending HIV/AIDS in addition to all the other human rights issues for which she worked. Her fight for human rights were a part of her own legacy as well as keeping the torch alive of her husband’s enduring legacy.
But Dr. Angelou made sure this aspect of her beloved friend’s life was noted. Speaking during Mrs. King’s funeral, standing in anti-gay Bishop Eddie Long’s megachurch where members of the infamous “God Hates Fags” Westboro Baptist Church were camped out front taunting those attending the funeral, Dr. Angelou let it be known Mrs. King cared for us, too.
“Born of flesh and destined to become iron. Born a corn flower and destined to become a steel magnolia. She loved her church fervently. She loved and adored her husband and her children. She cherished her race,” Dr. Angelou said at the funeral.
“She cherished women. She cared for the conditions of human beings, of Native Americans and Latin — Latino and Asian Americans. She cared for gay and straight people.”
As we honor Dr. and Mrs. King this weekend, let’s enjoy the parties and, for some of us, the day off. But let’s also be dedicated to being rainbows in the clouds.
(The concert will be broadcast nationwide Monday, Jan. 15, on NPR stations, including Atlanta affiliates WABE 90.1 FM and WCLK 91.9 FM.)
–
The Washington PostÂ’s John Kelly kicked off with a surprising sentence.
–