Equal pay day

President Barack Obama will sign two new executive orders on equal pay for women Tuesday, Politico reports. The executive actions coincide with “Equal Pay Day” — the date that symbolizes

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how far into 2014 women must work to earn the same amount of money men earned last year.

The Huffington Post reports that:”Both executive orders mirror provisions of the Paycheck Fairness Act, which Congress has twice failed to pass. One would prohibit federal contractors from retaliating against employees who share their salary information with each other. The provision is inspired by Lilly Ledbetter, the namesake of the first bill Obama signed on equal pay in 2009, who worked for nearly 20 years at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. before discovering that men in her same job with equal or lesser experience were earning significantly more money than she was.

“The second executive order will instruct the Department of Labor to create new regulations requiring federal contractors to report wage-related data to the government, in the hope that it will hold them more accountable for salary differences based on sex or race.

“Women who work full time in the U.S. make an average of 77 cents for every dollar men make — a number that has remained stagnant for a decade. Researchers who have taken into account factors that may contribute to that gap, including industry, education, college major and location, still find that men get paid 7 percent more than women, according to the American Association of University Women, a non-profit that works to increase equity for women and girls. The gap widens over the course of a woman’s career, especially if she has a college degree. Continue reading “Equal pay day”

United Nations: “Free and Equal”

UN-Born-Free-and-Equal-220x300Today, in the midst of a surge in anti-gay persecution and violence from Russia to Cameroon to Jamaica, and as LGBT rights issues continue to divide United Nations member states,

the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights launched Free & Equal, a major global outreach campaign for LGBT equality. Bilerico reports that:

“The year-long initiative, which will focus on public education and advocate for legal reforms, was launched at a press conference in Cape Town, South Africa. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay was joined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Justice Edwin Cameron of the South African Constitutional Court.

“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights promises a world in which everyone is born free and equal in dignity and rights – no exceptions, no-one left behind,” said High Commissioner Pillay, a native of South Africa. “Yet it’s still a hollow promise for many millions of LGBT people forced to confront hatred, intolerance, violence and discrimination on a daily basis.”

“Indeed, a press release from the human rights office notes that consensual same-sex relationships are still criminalized in more than 76 countries around the globe, discrimination against LGBT people is rampant in education, health care, and the workplace, and hate-motivated beatings, sexual assaults, and murders have been recorded “in all regions of the world.” Continue reading “United Nations: “Free and Equal””

Considering the Equal Pay Act in 2013

Anyone following conservative media this past week has heard arguments against the need for the Equal Pay Act, signed into law by President John F Kennedy 50 years ago. A thoughtful images-1

piece appeared on NPR.org today digging a bit deeper into these disputes, as well as both the immediate and less-than-obvious state of the very real gender gap in remuneration these days.

” Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in an effort to abolish wage discrimination based on gender. Half a century later, the Obama administration is pushing Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, designed to make wage differences more transparent. Some dispute the frequently cited figure that women are paid 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. But even those who argue the gap is narrower agree it’s most prominent when a woman enters her childbearing years.

“In 2010, an analytics firm called Reach Advisors crunched Census Bureau numbers and found something surprising: The median salary of single, childless women under the age of 30 was 8 percent higher than their male counterparts. That’s largely because more women are going to college than men. What made that number noteworthy is that it’s the only group of women who have a pay advantage. In fact, different numbers from Reach Advisors show that that early advantage vaporizes later in women’s lives — especially if they have children. Continue reading “Considering the Equal Pay Act in 2013”