I’m sure you’ve seen it in the news or on Facebook. Lawmakers in Ohio recently introduced The Ohio Equal Pay Act, a bill to help ensure women are compensated fairly and equally to their male counterparts. While this seems like a duh moment, there is a bit of controversy surrounding the bill and the wage gap in general.
This is the fifth time this bill has been introduced. So what exactly does this hard-to-pass bill include?
According to the Ohio House of Representatives, the Ohio Equal Pay Act would:
- Prohibit gag orders on employees that keep them from talking about their salaries with one another.
- Require vendors who do business with the state to obtain an Equal Pay Certificate, certifying that women at the companies are given equal opportunity for career advancement.
- Require government entities to evaluate their employees’ pay scales to ensure compensation is based on skills, responsibilities and working conditions across job categories.
In Ohio, your average working woman earns only 78 cents to every dollar that their male colleague makes. If you’re a minority woman, the numbers are even worse: in the US, African American females earn only 61 cents per equivalent male dollar, and Hispanic women earn only 53 cents.
As a working woman, my first (and, I would argue, natural, reaction) is outrage. How dare companies pay me significantly less, just because I’m female???
But after some thought and a lot research, it turns out that (for the most part), this isn’t some nefarious plot by Corporate America to get by with paying women less for equal work. It turns out, it has way more to do with societal expectations of women as wives and mothers, and it’s an extremely complex problem.
Let’s start by examining the career path of your typical female college grad.
She gets an entry-level job in her field of choice. For the most part, these employees all have the same base pay. So she starts out making exactly the same salary as her colleagues. She gets married and has her first child. While she doesn’t have paid maternity leave (a whoooooole other issue), she still takes six weeks off to bond with her baby and physically heal (Is that enough time? Again, another issue, another day…).
Her husband takes one week off and then is able to jump back into his job, having missed no more time than he would have if they’d gone to Hilton Head for vacation. But in those six weeks, or almost 12% of the work year, she got behind on tasks and projects while her coworkers in the same position kept trucking away on theirs. She’s the one rushing out of work at exactly 5 o’clock to pick up the kid from daycare (so they don’t have to pay any exorbitant late fees), even if she didn’t get everything finished she needed to that day.
Why isn’t her husband? Well, what would society think about a woman who isn’t there to pick up her kid, who instead chooses to stay late at work to finish up a presentation? That she’s a cold mother who doesn’t value her time with her child. It’s a double-edged sword because her boss gets frustrated that she doesn’t always meet deadlines. She’s seen as flaky and unreliable. But what about the father who stays late? Well, he’s working hard to provide for his family, making sure they can have the lifestyle they deserve.
And here is where things really start to have a huge discrepancy.
The kid is sick. It’s a fact (backed up by research) that the mother is more likely to stay home with a sick child. Why? Same reason as before. And if our happy couple has more children, that’s more time off work. When they take into consideration what she makes versus what it costs for two kids in daycare, a lot of families decide for the mom to stay home instead of return to work, with the plan that she’ll return when the kids go into school full-time. So let’s fast forward six years, and our heroine finally returns to work, except now she’s been out for an extended period of time, and her skill set is greatly reduced. Meanwhile, her male counterparts hired at the same time have continued to work their way up the corporate ladder, getting promotions and raises and new positions. Ta-da! Here enters the huge pay gap.
But how can you fault a company for paying someone less who, in reality, has done less work, has been less reliable and around less time? You really can’t, not from a business or profit perspective.
So the real issue, the real problem, is our country’s unequal expectations of women as mothers and men as fathers.
So what do we do, as women and as mothers, whether we’re in the workforce or not?
First, acknowledge that the wage gap is real and extremely complex.
Second, do your best to change how your family views traditional gender roles. Dads can stay home with kids. Literally no one stops them. Dads can pick them up from school or take them to piano lessons while you finish up at work, and that doesn’t change how good of a mother you are.
Lastly, support things like the Equal Pay Act. While it’s not a cure-all, it’s at least a step in the right direction.
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