Remarks as Prepared for Delivery by Director Jennifer Klein at “The Costs of Being a Woman”
Thank you, Daniella, and thank you to the Center for American Progress Women’s Initiative for inviting me here today for this important conversation.
When President Biden and Vice President Harris took office, we faced a divided country, a global pandemic, and an economy under severe stress. The Administration has moved quickly to deliver results for working families and has kept women and families at the center of our agenda. In the first year alone, President Biden added 6.4 million jobs – the most ever in one year – and has managed the fastest growing economy in decades, turning the tide on women’s labor force participation, which had hit a 35-year low.
On International Women’s Day last March, President Biden signed an Executive Order formally establishing the first White House Gender Policy Council, charged with leading a government-wide approach to advance gender equity and equality and with developing the first-ever national gender strategy.
The Gender Policy Council works on a range of issues impacting the economic security, health, and wellbeing of women and girls, with policy priorities that cross both domestic and foreign policy. As part of our work to strengthen women’s economic security, we are focused on making progress towards equal pay.
Equal pay is a matter of justice, fairness, and dignity – and it is essential to building an equitable economy and addressing the barriers that have long hampered women from fully participating in the labor force. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, we have seen women, particularly women of color, disproportionately working on the frontlines, caring for our loved ones, and working to combat the virus — but they continue to earn less than their male counterparts.
In 2020, the average woman working full-time, year-round, for wages or a salary earned 83 cents for every dollar paid to her average male counterpart. The disparities are even greater for Black and Native American women, Latinas, and certain subpopulations of Asian women, with some Asian women – such as Cambodian and Vietnamese women – earning among the lowest wages.
We all know these numbers well – many of us have tracked the incremental changes over the years. But it’s worth taking a step back to assess the impact that pennies can have. Over the course of a career, those cents add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost earnings, particularly for women of color.
Lower wages mean working women have less money – less money to pay the bills and less money to put away – and uniquely burden households led by single mothers. Lower wages also mean women receive lower Social Security benefits down the line, contributing to the disproportionately high rate of older women living in poverty.
For so many women, the gender wage gap acts as a virtual tax, making it so much more difficult to invest in their future.
That’s why this Equal Pay Day, the White House announced critical steps that the Biden-Harris Administration is taking to advance pay equity – beginning by using the tools we have to encourage transparency and to reduce pay discrimination.
The Office of Personnel Management announced they would begin work to address the use of salary history in the hiring and pay-setting process for federal employees. And the President signed an executive order directing the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council to consider limiting the use of salary history in employment decisions by federal contractors.
The Department of Labor also directed federal contractors to strengthen pay audits, which help organizations determine whether they are paying all their employees equitably and, if they are not, give them data to help correct that inequity.
The President has also issued Executive Orders directing the Administration to work toward ensuring that federal employees and employees working on federal contracts earned a $15 per hour minimum wage. Those directives went into effect in January, raising the wages of about 370,000 workers. In addition to helping the government do its work more efficiently, these directives take a step towards narrowing racial and gender disparities in income, as many low-wage workers are women and people of color.
Importantly, these actions address a range of variables that contribute to equal pay.
The pay gap doesn’t just reflect outright pay discrimination; it also results from the barriers that women face in accessing good-paying jobs and meeting caregiving responsibilities — including a lack of affordable child care, paid family and medical leave, and fair and predictable scheduling — which often prevent women from joining and staying in the workforce.
Women are routinely shut out of good jobs in high-paying industries, such as science and technology and transportation. On Equal Pay Day this year, the Department of Labor issued a report analyzing the impact that women’s concentration in low-wage sectors – and their relative underrepresentation in many good-paying occupations – has on their overall economic security and gender and racial wage gaps. The report finds that, in 2019, Black women lost $39.3 billion and Hispanic women lost $46.7 billion in wages compared to white men due to differences in industry and occupation. This occupational segregation intensified the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on women, in part due to the overrepresentation of women in hard-hit industries such as hospitality.
With the signing of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, we have a tremendous opportunity to transform the landscape of inequality in America – including through tackling occupational segregation. Administration investments through this law will increase access to good-paying jobs, including for women, people of color, and members of other communities who are currently underrepresented in the sectors where these jobs will be created, such as transportation, clean energy, and broadband.
To that end, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Labor recently signed a memorandum of understanding to promote the creation of good infrastructure and transportation jobs with a focus on equitable workforce development using funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
And, in the President’s Fiscal Year 2023 Budget, we proposed doubling the Department of Labor’s investment in its Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations grants, which provide pre-apprenticeship opportunities to boost women’s participation in registered apprenticeships – a proven earn-and-learn model that raises participants’ wages and puts them on a reliable path of the middle class.
We are also focused on improving the quality of the jobs in which women are overrepresented in the workforce.
Historically, women have typically held jobs with lower wages and fewer benefits and protections. Women of color are even more likely to work in these jobs. A prime example of this phenomenon is care workers in child care, elder care, and home health care sectors.
Although professional care is costly for families, caregivers themselves – disproportionately women of color – remain some of the most underpaid workers in the country, often having to rely on public income supports to get by. On average, child care workers make 23 percent below workers who do not work in child care.
Increasing compensation for child care workers helps narrow gender and racial pay gaps, as more than nine in ten are women and more than four in ten are women of color.
The American Rescue Plan made significant investments in child care, helping keep child care providers open and boosting pay for child care workers. States have already delivered American Rescue Plan stabilization grants to more than 150,000 child care providers serving more than 5 million children and their families. Many states also used funds to help boost compensation of the child care workforce. For example, Minnesota is requiring providers to increase compensation, while North Carolina and Connecticut offered bonus payments to providers who increased workforce compensation.
Disproportionate caregiving responsibilities also deepen the gender and racial wealth gap – for both informal caregivers and care workers.
As study after study has shown, women are expected to shoulder an unequal share of unpaid caregiving responsibilities. When families cannot afford or cannot find caregiving, it often falls on women to fill the gaps, forcing parents and especially mothers to forego higher paying jobs, work fewer hours, or take time out of the workforce, leading to lower pay over their career.
Over the past two years, the pandemic has only deepened these inequities as caregiving has become more expensive and more difficult to find. That is why the American Rescue Plan focused on reopening schools – as well as other vital support for women and families, including an historic vaccination program to direct payments to individuals to the Child Tax Credit, which lowered child poverty by forty percent.
And the President continues to urge Congress to pass his plan for child care, which could lower child care costs for nine in ten families with young children. Just this week, in his remarks announcing his Fiscal Year 2023 budget, he made the case for building a better America, outlining the investments needed to reduce costs for families, including by cutting costs of child care and health care.
This will build on the work we’re doing through the American Rescue Plan, which provided tax relief to help families with child care costs during the pandemic by delivering a historic increase in the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit to support millions of working families this tax season. This tax credit will reimburse most families for up to half of their child care expenses and it is fully-refundable, helping lower-income parents fully benefit regardless of their tax liability. We are proud of that progress — but there is more we need to do. If we are going to continue to grow our economy and to be competitive and lead the world in the 21st century, we simply cannot afford to leave half of the workforce behind. Thank you all for your ongoing efforts; we’re grateful for your partnership and leadership.