"It has really fallen off the cliff and it needs a bipartisan pathway," Schweer said. "One in four women in America are said to go back to work within 10 to 14 days of giving birth, which is astonishing and awful it is terrible for working women," Schweer said.īiden's proposed Build Back Better Act sought to provide national paid family leave, but the massive $2 trillion social spending bill is struggling in Congress, failing to gain support not only from Republicans, but also from Democratic Senator Joe Manchin. Only 23 percent of private-sector workers have access to paid family leave. The United States is the only developed country that does not have a national paid parental leave program. Some experts argue that mandating paid leave for new parents could help narrow the gender pay gap. The Department of Labor on Tuesday issued a report on occupational segregation showing that in 2019, Black women lost $39.3 billion and Hispanic women lost $46.7 billion in wages compared with white men because of differences in industry and occupation. Schweer, who leads the Bipartisan Policy Center's Paid Family Leave Task Force, said those women have less mobility throughout their careers and less opportunity to increase their wages than their male counterparts. "Women, particularly women of color, are overrepresented on lower wage jobs, on front-line jobs and jobs that we would have thought of as kind of essential workers throughout the pandemic," Adrienne Schweer told VOA. Women's soccer player Alex Morgan joins a conversation virtually with Vice President Kamala Harris, left, and other women's soccer players, during a White House Equal Pay Day summit at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex, March 15, 2022. In addition, women workers are overrepresented in industries that experienced the pandemic's worst job losses, such as hospitality. Women, who perform the majority of unpaid family caregiving, must deal with greater challenges managing work and care, with children home from school and older family members losing access to critical care services. The situation has worsened during the pandemic. "The existence of low-quality work – i.e., work that is low wage and without access to critical benefits such as paid leave – and the concentration of women, particularly women of color, in this work, is the biggest contributor to the pay gap," said Rose Khattar, a member of the Economic Policy Team at the Center for American Progress. "This is hopefully the first step in getting that rule reinstated," Reddy said. However, Vasu Reddy, senior policy counsel for economic justice at the National Partnership for Women & Families, told VOA that since September the Biden administration has been analyzing the data that was collected from private companies to show wage gaps by race and gender. The White House did not respond to VOA's question on whether officials plan to reinstate the rule. "While EEO (equal employment opportunity) rules uncover if the work force is gender-imbalanced, they don't reveal if women are in the low-paying jobs and men are in the high-paying jobs, or if in similar jobs, there is a gender pay gap," she told VOA. "This administration should restart those efforts," said Seema Jayachandran, a professor of economics at Northwestern University who focuses on gender equality. The Obama administration had mandated that large companies report how much they pay workers by race and gender but the Trump administration, under pressure from big business groups, halted the rule in 2017. While a growing number of European countries require employers to publish or provide their employees access to gender pay data, the United States does not mandate pay transparency in its private sector. In finance and science, on average, men take home at least $30,000 more than women doing the same work every year. Certain industries have an even larger gender pay gap. The disparities are even greater for Black, Native American and Latina women, as well as some Asian women.īiden's actions do not address the gender wage gap in the private sector. People stand in the Cross Hall of the White House and watch as President Joe Biden speaks during an event to celebrate Equal Pay Day and Women's History Month in the East Room, March 15, 2022.Īmerican women on average still earn 83 cents for every dollar earned by a man.
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