Economic equity news is a weekly round-up of articles by Donna Seymour of AAUW-NYS that features our core values of poverty solutions, opportunity and access, workplace fairness, healthy lives, equal pay and representation at all tables. Sign up for our mailing list to receive this directly to your inbox.
- DiFiore Confirmed As State’s Top Judge via NY State of Politics
Janet DiFiore was confirmed on Thursday by the state Senate to become the next chief judge on the Court of Appeals, the state’s top court. The vote in the chamber was unanimous. DiFiore becomes the second woman in state history to lead the court. The first, retired Chief Judge Judith Kaye, died earlier this month.
- Talk About Your Salary in the Fight for Pay Equality via AFL-CIO Blog
Something we can do right now to combat pay inequality in the workplace is talk with our co-workers about our salaries. While Congress works to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act to address the multiple barriers to pay equality, knowing our rights could help us now. A few things stand in the way of this seemingly simple task. It is still considered inappropriate to talk openly about money, especially in the workplace, where we could be making more than our colleague. In the fight for equal pay, studies show it is imperative that employees be able to compare salaries, especially if they are doing similar work and not paid the same. Knowing pay information gives us the bargaining power we need when negotiating salary. Beyond that, employers often tell employees they would be fired or reprimanded for speaking openly with others about their salaries. While this practice is common in the American workplace, it is actually illegal.
- How Many Women Earn More Than Their Husbands? via FiveThirtyEight
In a new survey of women in technology, 84 percent of respondents said they’ve gotten feedback that they were “too aggressive.” Yet 53 percent also said they’ve been told they were “too quiet.” A full 44 percent said they’ve heard both that they were “too aggressive” and “too quiet.” This is hardly the only double bind that women face in the workplace.
- The sin of the clergy pay gap via Ministry Matters
Last week, my fellow clergy sisters and I were hit with a gut punch when the new information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was released. For the first time, clergy income was reported, and, lo and behold, women made seventy-six cents for every dollar that men made, a substantially larger gap than the eighty-three cents to the dollar nationally. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, but knowing that there’s a gap is different from seeing those numbers in black and white and seeing them in comparison to other, similar professions.
- Protect Female Farmworkers via the New York Times
In a 2010 study from the University of California, Santa Cruz, more than 60 percent of the 150 female farmworkers interviewed said they had experienced some form of sexual harassment. In a 2012 report, Human Rights Watch surveyed 52 female farmworkers; nearly all of them had experienced sexual violence, or knew others who had. One woman told investigators that her workplace was called the “field de calzón,” or “field of panties.” As an Iowa immigrant farmworker told her lawyer, “We thought it was normal in the United States that in order to keep your job, you had to have sex.” The reasons behind this epidemic aren’t hard to fathom. Fields are vast and sparsely monitored; workers are often alone. It’s particularly bad for immigrant workers: The Department of Labor estimates that about half of farmworkers don’t have legal immigration papers, which makes them especially vulnerable. So do low wages and competition for jobs: Male farmworkers make an estimated $16,250 a year and female ones $11,250 a year. With depressed wages and so many workers competing for the same job, women are hesitant to complain.
Iceland has topped a huge survey (pdf) of gender balance every year for the past six years. And it’s not just maintaining a static lead while everyone else fails to catch up—it’s increased 10 percentage points in the last decade. The head of the World Economic Forum’s gender equality campaign, which conducts the survey, thinks Iceland could be the first to close its gender gap completely. “They’re at 87% of the gap being closed right now,” Saadia Zahidi tells Quartz. “So they would be the first, if they continue at current rate of change” to hit 100%.
Donna Seymour, who hails from the (far upstate) North Country of NYS, has spent 40 plus years advocating for children, women and family issues, equity, sustainability, and social justice issues. Currently serving as the Public Policy VP for AAUW-NYS (the American Association University Women), she is also a member the League of Women Voters, the Equal Pay Coalition, PTA, NOW, and Planned Parenthood, just to name a few.