How Pennsylvania women can achieve equal pay

As part of a landmark agreement announced last week, the U.S. women’s soccer team will now receive equal pay to the men’s team. The deal came as a result of a years-long fight by the women’s team, despite winning four World Cup championships and its members being some of the most recognizable athletes in the world.

While the agreement is historic for many reasons, it also shines a harsh light on how far we have to go to close the wage gap for all women in the U.S. Without significant changes, American women will not achieve equal pay to men until 2058. For Pennsylvania women, the wait will be even longer — until 2072, after all but the youngest members of today’s workforce will have retired.

Women in Pennsylvania are paid just 79 cents for every dollar paid to men. The numbers are even worse for Black and Latina women, who earn just 63 cents and 57 cents to the dollar compared with male workers, respectively.

While women make up the majority of those employed in fields like home health care and child care, many earn salaries too low to afford those essential services themselves, Pennsylvania Labor and Industry Secretary Jennifer Berrier noted at an event on March 15 marking Equal Pay Day. The day is held each year to reflect on how long into a new year women must work to earn what men made in the year prior.

The pay gap affects all sectors, including the legal field, where we work. According to the American Bar Association, 37% of attorneys in 2020 were women. However, female attorneys earned an average of $467 less per week than their male counterparts, or over $24,000 less each year.

The Philadelphia Bar Association’s board of governors has passed multiple resolutions over the years advocating for closing the gender wage gap. Perhaps what is most striking when looking back at those resolutions is how little progress we have made as a commonwealth and as a nation. A 2009 resolution supporting a federal Equal Pay Act stated that women made 77 cents to every dollar made by a man. Our collective progress on this issue amounts to just a couple of pennies over the last 13 years, during which a generation of young women completed their K-12 education and entered college.

So how can we finally make progress? In Pennsylvania, we can start by strengthening the state’s Equal Pay Act, which hasn’t been updated since 1967. That includes banning salary history questions during the job application process, as Gov. Tom Wolf did in 2018 for agencies under his scope of influence. Philadelphia began enforcing its Wage Equity Ordinance in 2020. Companies can also become more transparent about what salaries they pay for different jobs, as research shows women are less likely to negotiate pay than men. Individuals — including men — can do their part by normalizing talking about salaries among their coworkers.

The state could also increase its minimum wage, which at $7.25 is the lowest level permitted under federal law and has not changed in over a decade. According to the Women’s Law Project, women make up the majority of Pennsylvania’s minimum wage workers. A woman working full time at this wage will earn just $14,500 a year, nearly $5,000 below the U.S. poverty line for a single parent with two kids.

» READ MORE: Megan Rapinoe hails ‘a huge step forward’ in U.S. Soccer’s national team equal pay deals

But narrowing the pay gap is about more than equalizing pay: What’s also needed are better accommodations and protections for women who are pregnant or nursing, paid leave for all workers who choose to take time off to care for a new addition to their family or an aging parent, and more affordable child care options. Many women pause or slow their careers to have children or become caregivers and are then never able to catch up. Many of the highest-paid professions — the legal field included — still emphasize putting in weekends and long hours, which disproportionately hurts working mothers.

In addition to establishing equal pay for the men’s and women’s teams, the agreement by the U.S. Soccer Federation also provides child care for the men’s team during training camps and matches, something it has done for the women’s team for more than 20 years. In many respects, the agreement shows how far we have come in the way that we think about gender and traditional roles for women and men.

It’s 2022. Something so common sense as equal pay should stop being such a struggle.

Judy Berkman and Katayun Jaffari are cochairs of the Women’s Rights Committee of the Philadelphia Bar Association. On May 25, the committee is holding a free virtual event on “The Status of Women in Philadelphia.”