“This is a critical moment to redouble our efforts and to attack some of the structural barriers that have existed for women in the workforce,” says Tina Tchen, President and CEO of Time’s Up. This Equal Pay Day, the fight for equity is more urgent than ever. On average, women are paid 82 cents for every dollar paid to men, but the wage disparity is more pronounced among Black and Hispanic women who earn just 63 cents and 55 cents, respectively, on the dollar of their white male colleagues.
With women bearing the pandemic’s social and economic brunt, the crisis now threatens to erase the hard-won gains of recent decades. Women have either left or have been driven out of the labor market at exponentially higher rates than men, and as a result, they risk suffering more significant earnings penalties, which have dire consequences for all.
As the wage gap reflects the entrenched biases and inequities built into society and exacerbated by the pandemic, the work to make gender equality a reality has never been more critical. In advance of Equal Pay Day, I brought together six leaders on the frontlines of pay progress for an event dedicated to highlighting the most impactful actions to narrow the wage gap and solve for the systemic issues that drive it. Women from the boardroom to the sports arena share their mottos below for championing change and advancing equality below.
Stay The Course
Tough times don’t last, but tough people do. There’s going to be adversity. It’s going to happen. Life isn’t about trying to sneak through and avoid it. It’s coming. It’s really about how you deal with it. All the adversity that I’ve hit has totally changed who I am for the better through my career. If I have surgery on my knee, I’m not going to be the same player, but that’s okay. Adversity is where the true growth happens, and when things get tough, that’s when you’ve got to tie up those shoes and go. Because you’re going to be better for it on the other side.
It’s Not Rocket Science
I’ve seen too many times the knee-jerk reaction of addressing the symptoms. If you keep adding water to a leaky bucket, you’re going to be adding water forever, and you make zero progress. [Closing the pay gap] is not rocket science. We’ve got to go into the root cause and actually plug those gaps and understand that it’s the bucket at the end of the day. Let’s fix that bucket. This is not hard. It just takes some tension. We can put people on the moon. We can create cars that don’t drive. We can create plants that grow without any nutrients. We can create amazing things. We can fix the bucket.
Keep Pushing
To steal a quote from my old boss, President Barack Obama, ‘We are the change we’ve been waiting to see.’ It’s right here in front of us if we push hard enough. It’s not going to happen by itself, so we have to be the change. I really believe we’re in that transformational moment.
Take Your Seat At The Table
Women in sport are a microcosm of society. It’s incredibly reflective of what’s going on a grander scale. I let young women know that you can be involved in sport without having to be on the court, in the water, on the course. You can be in sport without just you being an athlete. And that’s where we need women most, because if we have women on the court who have male coaches, male CEOs, male GMs, it’s still not being reflected within the organization to change what we need changed. We need more women in executive positions for us to get the change that we’re talking about right now.
Get Involved
Women who have a platform should use it. We all need to call on a higher gear here, to respond to what could potentially be a devastating unwinding of decades of effort, around the advancement and the equality of women, from a pay and a workplace perspective. If you have a platform, I think you should feel a compulsion, and hopefully an enthusiasm, to use it to really drive change. None of us are going to get to our destination here alone. The [wage] gap won’t close on its own. We’ve all got to be engaged in this together.
Dedicate, Don’t Hesitate
It takes so many tiny victories to create a huge change. Dedicate, don’t hesitate. Whether you’re a surfer or not, an athlete or not, every day you can wake up and choose to ride a better wave.
