Equal Pay Day is the date on the calendar each year through which a woman who works full-time, all year-round must work in order to get paid the same amount a man did the previous year. For 2022, Equal Pay Day is today, March 15, 74 days after New Year’s Eve.

To understand how the gender wage gap expresses in our current economy, the U.S. Department of Labor today released, “Bearing the Cost: How Overrepresentation in Undervalued Jobs Disadvantaged Women During the Pandemic.” This report examines the experiences of working women during the pandemic. Some lost jobs, others left work to care for children or family, and still others did essential work putting their health and safety at risk. Women lost 11.9 million jobs compared to 10.1 million for men between February and April of 2020.

The report unpacks a concept known as “occupational segregation,” or the division of men and women into different types of jobs. For example, that 93% of child care workers are women, but women are only 2% of electricians. The types of jobs where women are concentrated are valued less and pay lower wages than those where men are concentrated.

In Hawaii, women make 89 cents for every dollar a man makes. The gap for women of color is wider, with Black women being paid only 83 cents on the dollar, and Hispanic women an average of 67 cents compared to men.

The good news is there are ways we can chip away at these disparities. For example, if you’re a woman in a union, you made up men’s 2021 earnings by Valentine’s Day, aka Union Women’s Equal Pay Day. That’s why Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh has made supporting worker organizing and collective bargaining a key feature of the department’s Good Jobs Initiative, an effort to harness unprecedented worker power to make inroads toward fairer and more sustainable working conditions for all.

Solutions to close the gender wage gap must involve disruption of occupational segregation and the gendered division of women into the lowest paying job categories. The Women’s Bureau works with state and local organizations who are providing pre-apprenticeship training, orientation services to help women learn about apprenticeship, and programming to address the workplace culture and need for supportive services that are key to success.

In Hawaii, one of the first Women’s Bureau Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) grants was awarded to the Maui Economic Development Board. The grant helped this board launch its Women in Tech program that puts more girls on the pathway to careers in STEM, through early interventions in high school and opportunities to engage with female role models about the work they do.

We can also take other actions, including:

>> Supporting women as they enter male-dominated fields.

>> Fighting to raise wages and ensure job quality in women-dominated jobs.

>> Making high-quality, affordable and accessible child care.

>> Increasing funding for home- and community-based care.

>> Supporting paid family and medical leave.

>> Strengthening overtime protections.

>> Demanding predictable scheduling.

>> Ensuring racial and gender equity in all jobs, especially those newly created climate and infrastructure jobs on projects funded by the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

We can recognize that the status quo — 74 extra days of work before we are compensated equally with men — are not conditions we have to accept, that we must not resign ourselves to unfairness simply because it’s so typical. Instead, we can imagine a post-pandemic recovery truly equitable, and where Equal Pay Day is Dec. 31.

———

Kelly Jenkins-Pultz is Region 9 administrator of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau (region includes Hawaii, Alaska, Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Washington).