Campus Engagement 2

For my second campus engagement I went to the Equal Pay forum put on by our classmates Nena and Nicole. There were four panelists; Janet Elinoff, Curtis Hierro, Maria Roman, and Anne Schiavi and the moderator was our very own Meredith Tweed. The idea of equal pay has always been something that I've heard about and something that I knew was still present, I guess I just never understood the full extent to which it still effects us. "When The WAGE Project looked exclusively at full-time workers, they estimated that women with a high school diploma lose as much as $700,000 over a lifetime of work, women with a college degree lose $1.2 million and professional school graduates may lose up to $2 million" (Now).

It seems like lately women are the brunt of a lot of jokes when it comes to demanding not only equal pay, but equality in general. Sometimes the jokes aren't even coming from the most obvious suspects. Hilary Rosen was recently quoted on CNN's AC360 saying that Mitt Romney's wife has no right talking about women's economic struggles when she "had never worked a day in her life" (Huffington Post). This is an extremely problematic statement because she has raised five children, but to many this is not considered a job. Women frequently face the problem of what is called the "second shift" where they leave their daytime jobs to go home and continue working to take care of a family. Women are frequently unaccounted for when it comes to unpaid labor. This was frequently brought up during the panel discussion with Nena and Nicole's moms when they talked about raising their children as single or divorced parents. They spoke about how they frequently had to give up any personal time they had when they were not at work for themselvesso that they could dedicated their time to their children, and the feelings of guilt they had for maybe not giving enough time. "Women's earnings were 77.4 percent of men's in 2010, compared to 77.0 percent in 2009" (Pay Equity). There is a gradual increase in pay for women, but still not enough to raise a family or live comfortably.

Personally, I feel like I have not been affected by this pay gap because I work in the hospitality industry. Frequently women make more than men when it comes to tip wages, for obviously problematic reasons. I do however, feel like I have experienced discrimination in the workplace for being a woman. One of my previous employers was accused of sexual harassment by many members of our team, but instead of being fired he was transferred to another store. It is important to understand that this issue is very much present, and on April 17, or Equal Pay Day, I made sure to spread the word.

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Works Cited

Minh-Ha, Trihn. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington [u.a.: Indiana Univ., 1989. Print.

"National Committee on Pay Equity NCPE." National Committee on Pay Equity NCPE. 19 Apr. 2012. Web. 19 Apr. 2012. .

Rosen, Hilary. "Ann Romney and Working Moms." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 04 Dec. 2012. Web. 19 Apr. 2012. .

"Women Deserve Equal Pay." National Organization for Women (NOW). Web. 19 Apr. 2012. .