98 Days

April 8, 2014 is Equal Pay Day.

That's how far into the year a woman will work for free compared on average to the wage of her male colleague - 98 days.

Earlier this month the AAUW released its annual statistics on the gender pay gap. Guess what?

It's still there.

Even though Congress passed The Equal Pay Act of 1963 -- 51 years ago -- women continue on average to earn less money working the same jobs as men.

In the 1960's the rate of inequality was recorded closer to 64%, but now it hasn't budged in a decade: The March 10, 2014 report shows that in 2012 women on average still only earn 77% of what their male equivalents earn, the same as it was in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011.

But I don't see this as a gender problem.

I see it as a societal one that with better tools we can resolve together.

In real numbers: if a man earns $35,000 a year and the woman next to him doing the same job only earns 77% of that, it means $27,000 a year for the woman - which factors out to be $600 less per month or $150 less per week. Or if she went to work every week from January 1 to April 8 without receiving any pay at all.

Or worked every Monday all year long for free. And some Tuesdays.

Men - if you knew that the competent woman next to you was being paid 23% less to do the same job, would you want to fix that?

My hope is your answer is, 'yes' because if it's 'no' then we have a much bigger problem.

A key here to the correction is wage transparency. We can't talk about what we don't know. We won't fix what we can't see.

Working women and men should never be under the threat of reprisal for sharing their salaries with each other.

Enter Lilly Ledbetter. From the National Women's Law Center:

"Lilly Ledbetter was one of the few female supervisors at the Goodyear plant in Gadsden, Alabama, and worked there for close to two decades. She faced sexual harassment at the plant and was told by her boss that he didn’t think a woman should be working there. Her co-workers bragged about their overtime pay, but Goodyear did not allow its employees to discuss their pay, and Ms. Ledbetter did not know she was the subject of discrimination until she received an anonymous note revealing the (significantly higher) salaries of three of the male managers.
After she filed a complaint with the EEOC, her case went to trial, and the jury awarded her back-pay and approximately $3.3 million in compensatory and punitive damages for the extreme nature of the pay discrimination to which she had been subjected."

Within months of the Lilly Ledbetter decision, in 2009 Congress passed the Fair Pay Act that gives employees some ability to challenge discriminatory compensation practices.

But having worked recently for a company with sketchy wage awards, I can tell you The Fair Pay Act does not go far enough.

After one woman in the company accidentally learned she fell into the wage gap, she attempted to renegotiate her salary with her boss. For more than six months she tried to convince him to pay her more, only to hit brick wall after brick wall.

Due to a clause in the employee handbook preventing open discussion about pay, she could not divulge to her boss that she knew she was being paid significantly less than her male counterpart. 

Further, she and her male colleague never had an honest conversation about why or how it happened. Only the boss knew why, yet he refused to acknowledge the situation. After all, she wasn't supposed to know there was a gap - and risked losing her job if she said she let on that she knew.

She contemplated filing an equal pay discrimination action with the EEOC. She learned from former employees of other suspicious hiring and preferential pay practices. The problem was, all of it could be explained as something other than gender bias or discrimination.

Was her substandard pay rate gender related?

Would her male colleague have stepped up to help rectify the situation if he had known?

As the advantaged benefactor would he even have perceived it as unfair?

What if the question of pay could have been an open one within the office?

Would that have changed anything?

What would you have done?

In this case we'll never know. Fearing retribution in an industry where she still worked, and without an emotional or financial safety net, she dropped her pursuit for the truth, got another job and moved on with her life.

It will only be after we can start talking openly with each other without fear of losing our jobs that we stand a better chance of shedding enough light on this 5,000-year-old problem to even begin trying to fix it.

While the solutions are not yet clear, doing something quiet is better than doing nothing.

As metaphor for the red ink women are drowning in, wear red April 8.

Sign this New York State Senator's Equal Pay for Women petition: http://www.nysenate.gov/webform/join-equal-pay-women-campaign-11

Talk about your pay. 

Even if you have to whisper.