April 17, 2009

Equal Pay Day Activities Planned

MACOMB, IL - - The National Committee on Pay Equity's (NCPE) annual observance of Equal Pay Day (EPD) will be Tuesday, April 28 to raise awareness about unfair pay for women and people of color in America.

According to Women's Center Director Janine Cavicchia, the Western Illinois University Women's Center has coordinated EPD activities including:

Census statistics released on Aug. 26, 2008, Women’s Equality Day, illustrated that the gap between men's and women's earnings changed by less than one percent from 2006 to 2007, narrowing only slightly from 76.9 to 77.8%. Based on the median earnings of full-time, year-round workers, women's earnings were $35,102, and men's earnings were $45,113. Median earnings for women of color are generally even lower, and all showed percentage drops in the last year.

According to a March 1 New York Times article, "Why Is Her Paycheck Smaller?," which included information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, “Nearly every occupation has the gap—the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between the size of the paycheck brought home by a woman and the larger one earned by a man doing the same job. Economists cite a few reasons: discrimination as well as personal choices within occupations are two major factors, and part of the gap can be attributed to men having more years of experience and logging more hours.”

For more information, contact the Women’s Center at wc.wiu.edu or pay-equity.org.

Copy By: Alison McGaughey, University Relations
Phone: (309) 298-1993 * Fax: (309) 298-1606