March 24, 2021, is Equal Pay Day. According to the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE), “this date symbolizes how far into the year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year."

Because women earn less, on average than men, they must work longer for the same amount of pay. The wage gap is even greater for most women of color.

Equal Pay Day was originated by the National Committee on Pay Equity as a public awareness event in 1996 to illustrate the gap between men's and women's wages. It was originally called ‘National Pay Inequity Awareness Day’ and changed to Equal Pay Day in 1998.

The National Committee on Pay Equity, which was founded in 1979, is a coalition of women's and civil rights organizations, labor unions, religious, professional, legal, and educational associations, commissions on women, state and local pay equity coalitions and individuals working to eliminate sex- and race-based wage discrimination and to achieve pay equity.

NCPE's purpose is to close the wage gap that still exists between women, as well as people of color, and men.

In 1963, when the Equal Pay Act was signed, women made 59 cents on average for every dollar earned by men (based on Census figures of median wages of full-time, year-round workers).

By 2012, women earned 77 cents to men's dollar, a narrowing of the wage gap by less than half a cent a year. Over a working lifetime, this wage disparity costs the average American woman and her family an estimated $700,000 to $2 million, impacting Social Security benefits and pensions.

This Equal Pay Day, women face additional burdens due to the pandemic, said MarketPlace dot org.

The economic fallout of the pandemic hit women much harder than men. And yet, oddly enough, the pay gap tightened, said C. Nicole Mason, president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, in a statement.

“And the reason for that is that we saw an enormous amount of job loss in lower-wage sectors for women,” Mason said.

Many women who work in restaurants and hotels and services lost their jobs, and that meant the women who were still working had higher incomes, which slightly narrowed the wage gap.

But, when you break down the data further, “we do fear that where the pay gap is already wide — for example, for Black women and Latinas — that we may see a widening of that gap,” said Gloria Blackwell at the American Association of University Women.

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