Equal Pay Day Tomorrow

Happy New Year, working women! Tomorrow, celebrate Equal Pay Day, the date representing how far into the year a woman must work in order to earn as much as a man earned the previous year. Here’s wishing you many more productive 16-month fiscal years in the future.

The National Committee on Pay Equity places the current wage gap at 33% 23%—for every dollar an American man earns, a woman will earn 77 cents. The gap is closing. But unnmarried women advocacy group (and internal punctuation activists) Women’s Voices. Women Vote has some more detailed statistics on the salary gap between unmarried women and married men. According to their data, in 2006, unmarried women earned 56 cents to a married man’s dollar, while married women earned 62 cents to their husbands’ buck.

Also interesting to note is that unmarried men haven’t got shit on married men, either. Those ubiquitous “Marriage Works” ads ain’t lying: In 2006, an unmarried man earned 64 cents to a married man’s dollar.

So what are the unmarried, the female, and particularly, the unmarried female to do? According to an economist friend of mine, just “work in higher paying industries and not have children.” And if you’ve been hesitating to settle on a husband, now might be the time to do it! Alternately, NCPE has some tips for wage and salary negotiations.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 10:00 am and is filed under Crushed Dreams, Jobs, Labor, Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.