By Areva Martin
According to “The Status of Black Women in the United States,” Black women have been turning out for elections and voting at unprecedented rates; they’ve also made significant strides in earning undergraduate and advanced degrees and have been succeeding brilliantly in opening their own businesses. And yet for all the progress, there’s one area where black women have been unable to move the needle very much, and that’s in getting paid fairly for their work.
According to a 2016 study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, black women are paid only 62.5% of what men make. It’s because of this gaping disparity that Equal Pay Day for African–American women won’t occur until August 7 this year. It’s the date at which Black women who worked full-time through all of 2017, and this far into 2018, will earn the same amount of money as men did in 2017. Or to put it another way, Black women must work almost 20 months to earn what men earn in 12.
