Media clips
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Costs in Virginia were already high before the pandemic. In 2019, the Economic Policy Institute said that Virginia ranked No. 10 on the list of states with the most expensive child care. That year the average annual cost of infant care in Virginia was more than $14,000. For a 4-year-old, the annual cost was nearly $11,000.
The Virginian-Pilot August 6, 2021 -
Within the American economy, hourly compensation and the productivity of workers have grown disproportionately. Between 1979-2019, the Economic Policy Institute found, employees have increased productivity by 72%, but their wages have only increased 17% in the last forty years.
Fast Company August 6, 2021 -
August 6, 2021
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Advocates for eradicating right-to-work laws say they degrade the power of organizing. Right-to-work laws “starve unions,” Heidi Shierholz, witness at the hearing and senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, told HR Dive. “They say that [unions] that have to represent all these workers, legally — they have to represent everybody in the bargaining unit — cannot charge for any of those services.”
HR Dive August 6, 2021 -
August 3, 2021, marks Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, and there are a lot of wage-gap statistics you need to know on this day — which highlights the amount of time Black women need to work to earn the same wages as their white male counterparts — include the troubling fact that Black women workers are paid only 68 cents on the dollar relative to white non-Hispanic men, even after controlling for education, years of experience, and location, according to the Economic Policy Institute. And, Black women must work four months longer than white women to earn the same wage. This is not equality.
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“Pay inequity directly touches the lives of Black women in at least three distinct ways,” Valerie Wilson, Janelle Jones, Kayla Blado, and Elise Gould reported on the EPI blog. “Since few Black women are among the top five percent of earners in this country, they have experienced the relatively slow wage growth that characterizes growing class inequality along with the vast majority of other Americans. But in addition to this class inequality, they also experience lower pay due to gender and race bias.”
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Additionally, the EPI reported that “regardless of their connection to the labor market, their level of educational attainment, or their occupation, they are paid less than their white male counterparts. The ongoing gender and racial discrimination faced by Black women means that seven months into 2017, Black women finally have equal pay with what white men earned last year.” The wage gap is not an alternative fact.
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The EPI reported in 2019 that even though white women have increased their hours the most between 1979 and 2016, Black women were already working more in prior years.
The EPI reported that an increase in the numbers of hours worked in response to slow wage growth has largely been among women, and is even higher for Black women.
One myth about Black women at work, and women in general, is that they choose lower-paying careers. In fact, according to the EPI, Black women are often subjected to occupational segregation, and are pushed into jobs mostly populated by other Black women.
Additional, the EPI reported that Black women earn less in every type of job. “While white male physicians and surgeons earn, on average, $18 per hour more than Black women doing the same job, the gap for retail salespersons is also shocking, at more than $9 an hour.”
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There is another myth that is often perpetuated that women could breakthrough the glass ceiling is they had more education. The EPI reported that two-thirds of Black women in the workforce have some postsecondary education, 29.4 percent have a bachelor’s degree or higher. However, Black women are still paid less than white men at every level of education.
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“As Black women increase their educational attainment, their pay gap with white men continues to grow,” the EPI noted. “The largest gap, of nearly $17 an hour, occurs for workers with more than a college degree. But even Black women with an advanced degree earn less, slightly more than $7 an hour less, than white men who only have a bachelor’s degree.”
Bustle August 6, 2021 -
To understand the origins of the gap between Black and white women, one need only look back as far as the 1970s, the decade that saw the first series of victories in pay and other gender-discrimination cases, says Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy. That decade also saw major increases in the number of women, particularly white women, in the full-time workforce. In fact, the growth rate for women in the workforce was twice that of men.
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But in the 1990s, a second pay gap, one between white women and other groups of women, emerged, Wilson, an economist, says, as white women experienced a faster rate of wage growth than Black women and other groups of women. That means that the pay gap is the handiwork of people who are, in many cases, still hiring and firing, promoting and making pay decisions today. Some of the deciders are themselves women.
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But the racial wage gap among women isn’t just about which industries which women enter. To be clear, Valerie Wilson says, it is also about bias, about stereotypes and notions of who deserves to earn what. The individual can try, and may sometimes succeed, in asking for fair pay. But there’s almost no way to negotiate past bias to eliminate all wage gaps. Pay disparities exist between white women and other groups of women at every rung of the income, experience and education ladder.
Time August 6, 2021 -
The pandemic compounded the calculations because Black and women of color were harder hit by unemployment, with 18.3% of Black women losing their jobs between February 2020 and April 2020, compared with 13.2% of white men, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
New York Daily News August 6, 2021 -
According to the Economic Policy Institute, at the current pace, we are likely to recover at five times the speed of the recovery from the 2008–09 Great Recession: This means in two years, not 10.
New Republic August 6, 2021 -
(Parents pay far more for infant care — an average $21,000 a year in Massachusetts, the second most expensive state in the nation for that age group, according to the Economic Policy Institute.)
Boston Globe August 6, 2021 -
Guest host Kevin McCorry is joined by Penn State Abington professor of economics and Economic Policy Institute researcher LONNIE GOLDEN
WHYY August 6, 2021