This week at IWPR, we focused on the Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, family poverty, child care, and higher education. Here’s everything you need to know:
5 Stats to Know on Black Women’s Equal Pay Day
Monday, July 31, was Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, marking how far into 2017 Black women must work to earn what White men earned in the previous year. The average Black woman working full-time earns only 63 cents for every dollar earned by a White man. This gap is wider than for women overall, who earn 80 cents for every dollar earned by a man.
>>Read the new blog
150 Years Later, Pay Gap Still Hurts Children
Equal pay for equal work, regardless of gender, has long been an issue in the United States. An 1869 Letter to the Editor of The New York Times questioned the fairness of the Treasury Department paying female clerks less than one-half the salary of men doing the same work. The women workers were not the only ones to suffer: “Most of them, too, have families to support; being, nearly all, either widows or orphans made by the [Civil] war.” Nearly 150 years later, the gender pay gap continues to exert a pernicious impact on children and families.
>>Read the one pager on how equal pay could cut poverty for working women by half.
The Gender Wage Gap and Work-Family Supports: Women’s Choices or Policy Choices?
A recent article published in the Saint Louis University Public Law Review by IWPR researchers Ariane Hegewisch and Emma Williams-Baron uses state-by-state data on earnings, employment, and work-family supports from IWPR’s Status of Women in the States project to draw attention to the links between the work-family policy infrastructure and the gender wage gap.
>>Read the full blog
Let’s Make Child Care More Accessible
In a recent opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed, Sarah Labadie highlighted the need for accessible and affordable child care. President Trump’s proposed budget plans to eliminate the Child Care Access Means Parents in School program (CCAMPIS). The program provides child care for low-income parents enrolled in institutions of higher education and is funded by the U.S. Department of Education. Since 2004, the number of college students raising children has gone up by 30 percent — at the same time, availability of on-campus child care is dwindling.
>>Read the full article
