Liberal lobbyists at Progress Iowa call on lawmakers to make equal pay a priority and increase salary transparency in the workplace:
Hardworking women across Iowa and the entire country deserve equal pay for equal work. Wages have flatlined for nearly the last 40 years, with public policy stuck in a 1950s mentality, resulting in an entire generation of workers getting more productive without getting a raise. Stagnant wages are even more problematic for women, who earn 79 cents for every dollar a man makes in America (it’s even worse for African American women and Latinas). In Iowa, the gap is even wider, at 77 cents on the dollar for women. And it’s not just an issue for women; in almost 72% of Iowa families, women are the primary or co-breadwinner. When women aren’t paid fair wages, families suffer the consequences.
“It is reprehensible and unacceptable that in the year 2016, women across the country continue to fight for equal pay. This is truly a no-brainer. It’s time to make equal pay a top priority in Iowa and across the nation”, said Matt Sinovic, Progress Iowa Executive Director. “In order to guarantee equal opportunities for future generations, we must act now and demand working women receive the wages they deserve. This is not a gender-specific issue. An investment in working women is an investment in working families. The pay gap is largest for women with advanced degrees. Pay should be based on education, experience and skill, not gender. We can do better. We should be ashamed as a nation, and it is past time to make equal pay one of our number one priorities.”
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Progress Iowa claims to be a nonpartisan multi-issue advocacy organization with a network of nearly 70,000. Year-round, Progress Iowa advocates for a stronger middle class, first-class public education, and fairness for all Iowans under the law.
4 thoughts on “Opinion: Equal Pay Can’t Wait. Hardworking Women Deserve Better.”
“Women get paid $0.79.”
Company still hires men for $1.00
Tells you this whole argument is BS
Equal pay for equal work about says it all. The libraterds want something for nothing as usual.
Evil corporations, in league with Satan and Rush Limbaugh, greedily hoard all profits at the expense of the workers.
If women make less than men for the same job, then why doesn’t everyone want to hire women?
Answer:
Because they don’t make less for the same work.
That 77% number has been thoroughly debunked (brought up to about 95-96%) when accounting for differences in education, experience, job type, etc. The 77% number should elicit an eye roll from anyone who does statistics professionally, or even has a decent understanding of quantitative analysis. We actually used the “wage gap” in class once with a department of labor dataset to illustrate how omitted variable bias could skew results.
You just can’t take the average women compared to the average man. You have to take women versus men who are identical in every aspect other than the fact that they are women rather than men. To do the former assumes gender is completely uncorrelated with every other variable of importance, which is a wildly aggressive assumption. Once this is done and a proper statistical analysis is done the gender gap almost disappears.
It’s already illegal to pay women less than a man for the same work. Go peddle your liberal B.S. somewhere else.