Academy Award Winner Arquette discusses gender pay inequality at NPC Newsmaker
“Women in the United States of America are paid less than men in 98 percent of all industries,” said Academy Award-winner Patricia Arquette at a Newsmaker press conference at the National Press Club April 12. “This is not just an entertainment-industry problem. This is a disgrace. It’s a hidden, national gender and race tax that women shouldn’t have to pay.”
The actor and gender pay-equity advocate joined Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-New York, on Equal Pay Day to publicize findings from a report just released by the Congressional Joint Economic Committee’s Democratic staff on the gender-pay gap. Maloney is the lead sponsor of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The report, "Gender Pay Inequality: Consequences for Women, Families, and the Economy", offers “dramatic, even startling” data, according to Maloney, along with the latest 50-state ranking of the gender-pay gap and analysis of income inequality faced by women over their lifetimes.
“Is it ‘We the people’ or ‘We the partial people’ or ‘We who deserve to be paid less?” asked Arquette, best known for her Oscar-winning performance in the film “Boyhood.”
Arquette said she is making the rounds on Capitol Hill to speak about the report and how women are “improperly protected from gender discrimination in the workplace.”
“This has continued for centuries,” Arquette said. “For 229 years, women have waited to be full citizens and we’re not waiting any longer.”
Many states make it a crime, Arquette said, to ask coworkers what they are being paid.
Poor children is another of Arquette's priorities and the impact wage inequality has on them. “Many have single moms. It’s a real human penalty when women are paid less,” she said, recalling her own childhood poverty and her mother’s struggles.
The report finds that women working full time on average earn only 79 percent of what men earn. Women of color face even larger pay gaps. Compared to white men, African-American women are paid only 60 cents on the dollar on average, and Latinas are paid only 55 cents on the dollar.
No state shows women and men with equal pay. New York is the least discriminatory: with a 13.2 percent gender-pay gap for women. Louisiana is the worst with a gender-pay gap of 34.7 percent.
Although it has narrowed, at the current rate of change, the gender pay gap will not close until 2059, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.
Two more disturbing findings show women’s median earnings below men at every education level and a gender-pay gap that grows as women age. In fact, women are often out-earned by men with less education. The typical woman with a graduate degree earns $5,000 less than the typical man with a bachelor’s degree, the report finds. On the age gap: while women, ages 18-24, earn 88 percent of their male counterparts’ earnings, women above 35 earn only 76 percent.
Women older than 75 are almost two times as likely to live in poverty as men, Maloney said. “It doesn’t matter how successful women are,” she said, “Just look at the women’s soccer team!”