"Fair" is not Equal

According to the Boston Globe, “most” women make 77 cents to every dollar “most” men make. But let’s be real– African-American women make 68.9 cents and Latinas make 60.2 cents to every dollar a Caucasian man makes. I’m not trying to pull the race card, but I pulled it anyway. It’s in my hand, and it’s hard to keep a poker face when it feels like I can’t win. I am not a man, and I am not “most” women. And I don’t identify with the statistics the AFL-CIO provided.

The Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) was augmented by the Equal Pay Act (1963), and the latter supposedly abolished wage disparity based on gender. That only took 25 years, and it’s 47 years later. Tomorrow, the Senate will  vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act. The bill requires employers…

to prove that any difference in pay is the result of a business necessity, and to demonstrate why they didn’t adopt a plaintiff’s suggested “alternative remedy’’ that wouldn’t result in a pay gap.

The Paycheck Fairness Act is beautifully worded. The bill addresses gender inequality in the workforce, but it circumvents the issue of equal pay. Brown v. Board of Education ruled that separate is not equal, but apparently “fair” is not “equal”, either.

I am not a man. I am not “most” women. I am not African-American. I am not Latin-American. These statistics bombard me with messages of who I am not.

I know who I am. I don’t need anyone to tell me who I am. But I need everyone to realize who I am.

I am a Woman. I am a Woman of Color, and there is no way to quantify my immeasurable work-ethic, but employers need to start trying.

By Suzanne Kordi

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 27th, 2010 at 8:57 pm. It is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.