Batgirl Demands Equal Pay, Now!

Didn’t realize today was Equal Pay Day? Well, Batgirl did! Check out the video above in which you can see 1970s Batgirl fighting for fair and equal pay regardless of gender. There’s also some important facts and figures about how the disparity in pay based on gender may affect you. We’ve definitely seen improvement in this area, but there’s still a long way to go. If left alone, the gender gap in wages won’t equalize until 2058. Personally, I don’t think I should wait forty-three years to know that I’m getting paid the same as any man doing my job. Hell, I’ll be in my seventies by then and (hopefully?) won’t even be working!

Did you know that on average, women make 78 cents to every man’s dollar? What’s more, that it’s worse for women of color? Black women make 64 cents to every man’s dollar on average, while Latinas make 54 cents. This means that women end up working for free for much of their working lives to equal any man’s paycheck doing the same job.

In fact, April 14th is Equal Pay Day because that marks how far into the year a woman works for free before starting to earn a salary equal to a man’s. That’s 74 days working for free. And again, this is worse for women of color. Black women tend to work “for free” 149 days, Native American Women work 179 free days, and Latinas (once again) have the worst of it, working 201 free days a year.

And that’s to say nothing of the wage disparity for trans women, for whom studies show a decrease of one-third in pay as they transition (as opposed to trans men, whose pay tends to go up as they transition and appear more male). That’s if they can get hired at all. That’s what wage disparity does. This is why it’s still a problem that needs solving. For all women. This is why Equal Pay Day is so important.

If you’d like some help in educating people on what’s up (besides linking to this article, of course!), check out this awesome #FairPayNow Social Kit from Fitzgibbon Media! In it, you’ll find some great info and links to studies that will hopefully get people fired up and remind them that a big fight that feminism faces is the one for Equal Pay – because women can’t be equal in society if they don’t have the same access and resources that men do to design their own lives.

(via The US Dept. of Labor and The Center for American Progress)

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