By Mollie Reilly

“As California continues to grow and diversify, large segments of our state’s minority population are facing devastating economic inequality,” Hall said in a statement upon the bill’s passage in the legislature. “No employee should be denied an equal wage for an equal day of work.”

While American women are paid an average of 81 cents for every dollar earned by a man, the wage gap is significantly larger for women of color. Black women earned 66.8 percent and Hispanic women made 61.5 percent of what white men were paid in 2015, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

But there’s also a gap for men of color. According to a Pew study, black men earned 73 percent of what white men did in 2015, while Hispanic men earned 69 percent of white men’s income. That gap has remained largely unchanged since 1980.

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