Tom Harkin: “Tomorrow is Equal Pay Day. What is Equal Pay Day? That is the day that symbolizes how far into the year a woman must…”

“Tomorrow is Equal Pay Day. What is Equal Pay Day? That is the day that symbolizes how far into the year a woman must work from the previous year on average to earn as much as a man earned by December 31 of last year. It is unbelievable to me that more than four decades after passage of the Equal Pay Act and the Civil Rights Act, women are still making only 77 cents on the dollar to what a man makes. In Iowa, it is even worse. The Iowa Workforce Development Agency found that across all industries, women in my State make less than 62 percent of what men make. Discrimination takes many forms. Sometimes it is brazen and in your face, like Jim Crow and apartheid. Sometimes discrimination is silent and insidious. That is what is happening in workplaces across America today. Millions of female-dominated jobs--social workers, teachers, childcare workers, nurses, so many more--are equivalent to male-dominated jobs, but they pay dramatically less. The Census Bureau has compiled data on hundreds of job categories, but it found only five job categories where women typically earn as much as a man. Defenders of this status quo offer all manner of bogus explanations on why women make less.”