Workplace Gender Equity in Allen County
In the first quarter of 2022, the Women’s Fund wrapped up the first Economic Security Pilot Group. This cohort of 12 local workplaces, ranging in size from 30 to 6,000 employees, participated in a two-step process. First, they completed the Compass Survey. This collection tool focused on the demographics of each workplace – namely around gender, ethnicity, and race – and what percentage of each demographic fell into individual pay brackets or had access to certain benefits and policies.
While the full results from this pilot group will be published in their entirety later this year as a freestanding report, there are a couple of interesting pieces of data that need to be shared. First of all, 43% of leadership positions were held by women, but only 6% were held by women of color. And in the bottom 10% of full-time employee salaries, 49% were women, and 36% were women of color.
We also learned that only 11.1% of these organizations conduct both gender and racial wage gap analyses. The average pay gap between what men and women earn in our community is just under $16,000. The gender pay gap is most disparate for women of color: Black women are paid 57 cents per $1 paid to white men, AANHPI women 75 cents, Native and Indigenous women 50 cents, and Latina women an abysmal 49 cents.
It was only half a century ago that women were finally able to compete for the same jobs as men in the workplace. Women were of course working before the 1970s, but the only available positions were those deemed as “women’s work:” certainly not any kind of leadership positions. We must remember that the surge of progress for women in the economic sphere was directly related to changes in culture and policy.
The Equal Pay Act of 1963.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978.
Women are still underrepresented in the workplace, and women of color lose ground at every step. COVID-19 shed light on the cracks that still exist in women’s equality in the workplace. Since the onset of the pandemic, women lost more jobs than men at such a rapid pace that the new term “she-cession” was coined to describe the sudden change in the workforce. As of early February, there were still 1.4 million fewer employed adult women in the workforce than pre-2020, as supposed to 500,000 fewer adult men. For every man that has returned to the workforce, three women have not.
According to the latest World Economic Forum’s Global Gender gap report, the global gender gap is now not expected to close for another 136 years, as opposed to within the next 100 years calculated pre-Covid. If the pay gap was closed, women would have enough additional money each year to cover an entire additional year of childcare, one year of tuition and fees for a four-year public university, more than nine months’ rent for the following year, or more than a year’s worth of food.
We know the hardest hit in the she-cession were women in high-stress, low-paying service jobs, such as nursing, education, hospitality, and childcare. We also know that these jobs are usually employed by Black and Brown women. According to the National Women’s Law Center, as of February 2022 unemployment rates dropped or remained the same for almost every race or ethnicity except for Black women, with an unemployment rate of almost double that of white Americans.
Discussion around the she-cession can easily feel like an issue facing the much larger cities scattered across the country instead of an issue we are facing right here at home. But our own Economic Security Pilot Group results show just how untrue that is: only 29% of the highest salaried full-time employees were women, and only 3% were women of color.
When we have advocacy focused on supporting women’s economic security, real change happens. And we know that when women thrive in the workplace, everyone thrives in the workplace. A new study by Pew Research shows that women are more likely to champion DEI initiatives in the workplace, and that women in leadership tend to provide more holistic support to their employees.
When we move what matters for women’s economic security, our whole community benefits.
How can you support women’s ability to thrive in the workforce?
Learn how to be an effective ally, or how to identify one.
Ask your workplace what the strategic plan in your organization is to attract, support, and promote women.
Mark the dates for Equal Pay Days to share information with your networks.
Continue to support our work, so that we can continue educating employers on benefits, policies, and workplace culture shifts that help promote gender equity.