Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Former Theranos president Sunny Balwani is sentenced to almost 13 years in prison, Brittney Griner was released from a Russian prison, and Thursday marks equal pay day for Latinas.
- Equal pay. Thursday, Dec. 8 is Latina Equal Pay Day. In 2021, Latinas working full-time and part-time jobs earned just 54 cents for every dollar the average white non-Hispanic man earned. Over the course of a 40-year career, Latinas will lose out on nearly $1.2 million in income compared to white men, meaning they would have to work until they were 90 years old (six years past their 84-year life expectancy, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) to make up for lost wages, according to the National Women’s Law Center.
“When we look at Latinas in our country, it is clear that we are not working half as hard, it is clear that we are not half as good at our jobs, and we are not half as qualified,” Mónica Ramírez, co-founder of The Latinx House and chair of the annual Latina Equal Pay Day campaign, tells Fortune. “There is absolutely no justification that we're being paid essentially half of what a white male worker is being paid.”
The burden the pandemic placed on women and workers in frontline occupations delivered an outsized blow to Latinas' income that will continue to reverberate in the coming years. Already overrepresented in low-wage and frontline occupations, Latinas were hit disproportionately hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. The unemployment rate for Latinas ages 20 and older peaked at 20.1% in April 2020, compared to a 13% peak for the overall job market that same quarter. While Latinas’ unemployment rate is now below pre-pandemic levels, nearly one in five unemployed Latinas has been out of work for six or more months. As Latinas return to the workforce, more may be pressured to accept part-time or underpaid jobs instead of waiting for a better opportunity; one in eight Latinas is working a part-time job involuntarily instead of a desired full-time role, according to the NWLC. Worse still, the ongoing childcare crisis and lack of social nets for Latina-led households, who already live below 200% of the federal poverty level for a family of three, could lead to long-term consequences.
“We didn't do anything in the pandemic to fix any of these structural issues,” Jasmine Tucker, director of research at the NWLC, tells Fortune. While some pandemic-related support like stimulus checks offered temporary relief, failure to address health care inequity or pass measures like the Paycheck Fairness Act created more barriers to long-term action. “It was so clear in the pandemic what we needed to do, and we didn't do it.”
But policy isn’t the only place where the wage gap is under-addressed. Employers and business leaders must bear the responsibility of eliminating bias when hiring and promoting Latinas and women of color and ensuring better representation in the C-suite. It cannot be a simple matter of requesting that women negotiate better; despite asking for raises and promotions at the same rates as men, only 75 Latinas will be promoted to managerial positions for every 100 men, according to Lean In and McKinsey’s 2022 Women in the Workplace report.
“It is not our fault that we didn't somehow fail to do a good enough job by advocating for ourselves when employer bias is impacting the way that we're being treated and evaluated,” says Ramírez. “To put it on a Latina, or any other woman worker, [and] suggest that we have to do something better to make sure that we're being paid fairly is gaslighting. And that needs to stop.”
Employers must also create policies surrounding childcare and paid sick or medical leave that will allow these women to stay and thrive in the workplace. “[Employers] shouldn't need to wait for a law to be passed for them to fix this,” Ramírez says. “My hope for the future is that Latinas will be able to work for people who value them as people, who understand the importance of their contributions, and will do what is needed to be able to keep them in the workforce.”
Paige McGlauflin
paige.mcglauflin@fortune.com
@paidion
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