Q: Gender Equality without Economic Equality?

A: Not equality.

The women’s movement has advanced our opportunities greatly and then seemed to go right out of style, leaving women in a working world with inherent inequalities that left alone, may never be resolved. These opportunities for women have only led us to the false impression of equality because equality without economic compensation is not equality.

Women are powerful. Just look at what we have done with opportunity. Nearly half of all workers are women. More women enter into the work place each year than men. More mothers of young children work than don’t. Almost half of all Americans working multiple jobs are women. We earn more professional degree’s than men, more bachelor degrees, more master degrees, and close enough to be called half of all the doctoral degree’s. The woman’s movement punched a small hole in the glass ceiling and since then we have been marching through in ever increasing numbers.

Yet here in Wisconsin, college educated, full time, year round, working women only earn 74% of the wages when compared to the same group of men. No matter what group of workers you compare, once women and men achieve adulthood, equality in pay for labor disappears. When working in traditional female occupations our jobs are economically under valued and when women work the same jobs as men we are just plain cheated. Female social workers earn less than male social workers, female teachers earn less than male teachers, female retail clerks, female computer operators, female doctors, female surgeons, female professors, and female lawyers all earn less than their male coworkers. If this were just a phase that as women we must endure before achieving equality than we would stand equal to other developed nations in our gender gap, but we are not. The United States of America in a 2007 study stands 31st in the world in gender disparity in earnings (World Economic Forum, Gender Gap, 2007)

American families can no longer afford to be cheated out of their fair compensation then blamed for the situation they find themselves in. Thirty percent of all American families are raised by a single parent. Of single parent families women raise over eighty percent, and thirty three percent of these families exist below the poverty level. (America’s families and living arrangements, 2006) Almost ten thousand dollars per year are lost to families with working women as members—and American working families lose 200 billion per year because of the gender earning gap.

We cannot have gender equality without equality in economic opportunity.

- MP, YWCA staff member & empowerment advocate

(Editor's Note: Want to learn more about this issue? Keep reading later this week for a series of posts on retirement impact, pay equity links, and some local solutions.)