Women’s Center to observe Equal Pay Day
Women would have had to work an extra 104 days this year to make the same amount as men did last year, said Mimi Price, a work study student at the University of Idaho Women’s Center.
To recognize this wage gap, Equal Pay Day falls on the 104th day of the year, April 14.
“It’s a day of recognizing that the gendered wage gap does exist, really just taking a day to talk and discuss about ways to close the gap or why the gap is happening or how to encourage women to talk about money and to realize it’s happening to them,” Price said.
The Women’s Center will host a booth to talk about the wage gap from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tuesday at the Idaho Commons plaza. The booth will have information and resources, including pamphlets about how to encourage employers to talk about money.
“I feel like we don’t educate college students about what to expect when they leave college,” Price said. “The wage gap happens the second you leave college.”
Price said she wants students to be successful, so these resources are available to help women learn to negotiate wage and realize their worth and value and how to demand it.
Price said a woman, on average, makes 77 cents per every dollar a man makes. But she said this isn’t the best statistic, because it doesn’t factor in an individual’s race, ethnicity or socioeconomic class.
“The problem isn’t women being paid the same,” Price said. “The problem is women aren’t being valued the same as men, and the system of that is the wage gap.”
Assistant Director of Programs at the Women’s Center Bekah MillerMacPhee said people should come to the booth to learn about the gender wage gap because it is on such a large scale it shouldn’t be ignored.
“It affects a lot of people,” MillerMacPhee said. “Wage is something that you can’t do anything about if you don’t know about it. We’re pretty discouraged from talking about how much we make with each other, and that really serves to keep us all in the dark about the injustice of who we find to be more valuable.”
MillerMacPhee said the booth would also address misconceptions people may have about the wage gap.
“It’s not like there’s this finite amount of money,” MillerMacPhee said. “If we close this gap, it’s not like men are going to make less. It’s going to be good for everybody. It doesn’t mean that anyone’s going to lose funds or power. It means that everybody is going to do better and put more money into the economy.”
Kelsey Stevenson can be reached at [email protected]