It’s Black Women’s Equal Pay Day. No Matter Who You Are, That Should Matter to You

It's not quite a cause for celebration, but August 21 is Black Women's Equal Pay Day, which marks the point in 2019 at which the average black woman's wages at last equal what a white man earned in 2018.

For women overall, it takes about 16 months to make what a white man makes in 12. But for black women, that number is higher. It takes 20 months to even out. Native American women won't meet the benchmark until late September. Latinas will hit it in November. To mark this…inauspicious occasion, we invited Meena Harris, founder of the Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign, to interview Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza. Harris, who also serves as a commissioner on the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women and holds a leadership position at Uber, established the Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign to raise awareness about social causes in partnership with nonprofit organizations that support women's rights on the ground. Here she and Garza chat about the gender wage gap, the economic importance and potential of black women, and what it means to be an activist.

Meena Harris: Today is Black Women’s Equal Pay Day (BWEPD), which, as you know, signifies the approximate day a black woman has to work into the new year to make what a white man made at the end of the previous year. Based on census data from 2019, black women are only paid 61 cents to every dollar that a white man makes. Can you talk about the significance of this as an economic issue?

Alicia Garza: When you hear statistics about the gender wage gap in America, we often hear that women make 78 cents on the dollar that white men make. Actually, those are statistics looking specifically at white women. What it points to is that the economy is organized by race and by gender all at the same time. There are communities who sit at the intersection, and one of those communities is black women. So if we’re not looking at how the economy is organized by race and gender and the communities that sit at those intersections, when we try to develop policies or solutions to a pervasive problem, we will leave communities behind, and black women are very susceptible to that.

We see this happen all the time with issues when they’re not viewed from an intersectional perspective. For Black Futures Lab’s 2019 Black Census Project, you looked at priority issues and concerns for black people across the country and found that the issue of low wages not being enough to support a family was the number one concern of black respondents. How does this map onto the wage gap for black women?

First and foremost, what’s important to know is that black communities are rarely asked how and what we experience in the economy, democracy, and in our society. That’s why we set out on this project particularly in leading up to a major presidential election. Every time we see a presidential candidate come up on the stage, they’re talking about how they’re going to improve the economy. The reality is that not everyone is experiencing the economy in the same way.

Any policy or proposal that wants to tackle this issue has to look at how the economy is organized by race and by gender. We find when you start with the people who are experiencing the problem the worst and most frequently, it actually creates the most possibilities for everyone to rise.

So we know that, when we do right by black women—particularly those who are primary breadwinners, particularly those who are also dealing with other economic issues like mass incarceration or inadequate schools for their children—and when we raise their wages, the entire country benefits. It’s not just about numbers. It's about families and what’s keeping us up at night, and the solutions we know can help to change the lives of everyone in America.

When the Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign launched our equal-pay campaign over two years ago, we started it precisely because of what you’re talking about: This intersectional analysis was missing from mainstream discourse. Ordinary people knew, if anything at all, about equal pay day in April, which is the average pay gap for all women, regardless of race. The point was to raise awareness around the fact that it’s much wider for women of color, and different women of color experience it in different and distinct ways—black women experience it differently than Latinas and Native American women, and so on.

I also want to talk about black trans women, whom we know are most often left out of the conversation. Studies have found that transgender women’s wages fall by nearly a third after they transition. I wasn’t able to find the numbers specifically for black trans women, but we’re having a crisis in our country already, where 15 trans women have been killed just this year. Can you talk about how we can really focus on black trans women in a meaningful way? I can’t even find the numbers—they’re invisible in this conversation.

One of the things that we prioritized in our survey was making sure that our understanding of who black communities are gets expanded so we have a better sense of what all black communities are experiencing as it relates to the economy, democracy, and society. We're getting ready to release a report on our data that looks at the major issues that are keeping black folks up at night based on gender. We surveyed a pretty significant number of black folks who identified as trans, gender nonconforming, or nonbinary, and what we found was that there aren’t a lot of studies that have a sense of what it is that black trans folk or black folks who don’t fit in the typical framework are experiencing. We found that our respondents who were trans and nonbinary had lower incomes overall than the rest of the respondents for the black community. Eighty-seven percent of black trans women who took the survey reported incomes below $50,000 a year as opposed to 66% of black census respondents overall. Black trans women also reported significantly lower income, with 29% of the respondents who were black trans women reporting an income of less than $15,000 a year as compared with 16% of respondents overall who reported an income that low.

When we develop policies that address these pervasive issues, what’s at stake if we leave behind black transgender women or those who don't identify in the gender binary? The solutions won’t reach the community. Black cisgender women will get a higher wage as a result of policy, but black trans women get left behind and remain stagnant. If we’re going to make the changes we want to see, it’s important for us to be building coalitions with black trans women as well.

This year our two organizations, the Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign and Black Futures Lab, are partnering on a BWEPD campaign called Phenomenally Black, and the goal is not only to raise awareness about important issues like pay inequality but also to flip the script and use this as an opportunity to recognize and celebrate black women. They are heads of household, they make up the largest group of minority-women-owned businesses, and they are a key voting block with one of the highest voter turnouts. When you lift up black women, you lift up entire communities and the entire country. In all of your work, from being the cofounder of Black Lives Matter and now founding Black Futures Lab, building political power for black women has been a central focus for you. Can you talk more about that, especially in the context of 2020 and what we saw in the midterms? Are things changing? Have things shifted?

I think part of the problem is that even though black women in particular are powerful in our democracy, we may not think that we are. So often what black people and women experience in politics is that we step up enormously—black women in the last three election cycles outvoted women of all other races and ethnicities. Yet when we look at the proposals or policies coming forward to address these pervasive problems in our communities, these policies and proposals tend to be race-neutral in a way that adversely affects our families.

Being a part of a campaign like Phenomenally Black not only allows us to acknowledge the hard work that black women have been doing for this country time and time again, but also allows us to activate and inspire black women to be more powerful. If we can build our power, if we can lift our voices and build the kind of coalitions that don't leave anyone behind, then we can really change the way politics happens in this country. That’s why I'm excited. It’s important for black women who are struggling to make ends meet, struggling to hold families together, that they understand that we really are the superheroes of this moment and that it’s not only about the sacrifices we make but also about the way we’re shaping this country to live up to the promise it’s made to all of us.

This is not the first time we’ve partnered on a campaign together. In September 2018 we worked on the #1600Men campaign during the Kavanaugh hearings. That campaign, similarly, was first about honoring and celebrating the work of the black women who took out a full-page ad in the New York Times in 1992 in support of Anita Hill. We wanted to make sure that black women were recognized as having laid the groundwork for the actions taken around Christine Blasey Ford when she, like Anita Hill, came forward to hold a powerful man accountable. The campaign was also about using that inspiration from black women to talk about the importance of male allies. For Phenomenally Black, we’re once again engaging men to talk about BWEPD. Can you talk about the importance of male allyship and the importance of men supporting women leaders and black women?

One of the things that always flabbergasts me is that issues like equal pay get framed as a women's issues, in that only women care about it. When, certainly, if there are men in our household, then this is a major issue that should impact them as well. For those who get that, they're fighting just as hard for the rights of all of us to live with the dignity that we deserve. With the #1600Men campaign, we agreed that it was important that the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court was not just something that was resisted by women, but that it be resisted by people who believe that all of us deserve to live with dignity and that all of us deserve to be able to make decisions over our own bodies and when and where and how we might start families. We all deserve to be free of sexual violence and know that all of those issues don’t just impact women, but they also impact men and people all across the gender spectrum. When we are engaging in social-change efforts, it's really important for us to be thinking about who else is on the team, who else would need to be brought into the fight. I know that because way more than 1,600 men signed on to that campaign. Male supporters were in the tens of thousands. The role of allies, in general, is to recognize that what impacts one person, impacts all of us. Whether that be directly or indirectly, our role is not just to hold the sign and say, “Woo-hoo, go forth and prosper,” but it really is to take on these fights as if they’re our own—because they are.

I don’t think enough people are asking this question, even though it’s relevant and fairly easy to respond to—in the workplace, what are practical things men can do day-to-day to be allies and make this their own issue?

One practical thing you can do is really push for an audit in your own workplace of wages by gender. I know a lot of organizations that have taken on this inquiry and found that women are being paid less and that women were being tracked into roles that were administrative or support roles rather than managerial or decision-making roles. Even in some cases, women were getting paid less for doing the exact same job as men.

For some of us, making change in our workplace is actually a high-level ask, so another thing you can do is make sure there is gender parity and equity in your own home. So often women are holding more than half the sky. We are going to work, we are bringing home the bacon, and we are also taking on the lion's share of taking care of children, taking care of family members who are elderly, who might be ill or living with disabilities, and on top of that we’re expected to provide emotional support. One of the important things to do in our everyday life is just to interrogate that. For men who are trying to do something right now, ask yourself, How much of the child care do I take on in my own home? How much of the household labor do I take on in my own home? How much of the household labor do I take on that is typically considered women's work? How much of the labor I take on is for emotional support when people in our family need that? I think that that is not only good for our families as they exist right now, but it also provides an example for kids on how to disrupt the ways gender and race organize our society, and how we can do that one family at a time.

I want to end on a personal note—there are few people in the world I admire as much as I do you. I can't think of anyone better to exemplify what I think it means to be Phenomenally Black. In the work that I do with the Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign, people sometimes call me an activist and I often respond by saying I'm not comfortable accepting that title because I know real activists, and they’re people like you. How do you view yourself and the work you do? How do ordinary people like me who may not consider themselves an activist at all, or are not able to do this full-time, make a meaningful impact?

So many times we think about activists as protestors, people who get arrested for their beliefs, and yes, those people are activists, and some are organizers. But people who take smaller actions to resist unjust laws also take on that title.

When everything is at stake, it’s really important for all of us to adopt the "activist" title. The more of us that do, the more it sends a clear signal to the powers that be and to our opponents that we are not sitting back and taking this lightly. The more of us that step up, the more of us that take action—whether that be taking action in our home or taking action in the street—it's going to take all of us to change the country.

Meena Harris is the founder of the Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign.

Originally Appeared on Glamour