 We offer coming to an extremely important and also topical event as we try to have our events at EPI be important and timely and topical. And today's discussing dimensions of the gender pay gap couldn't come at a better time given the political conversation and also the very real circumstances facing American families. So we're delighted to be able to dig deep into this issue and get beyond some of the knee-jerk topical reactions to an issue that has many dimensions. And often when issues have lots of dimensions people tend to dismiss them because there's no easy answer. And what we hope to do with today's panel is to recognize that the dimensions to the gender pay gap don't in any way correct its authenticity or its legitimacy but really provide multiple avenues for people to care and multiple avenues for people to advocate for different policy solutions and to understand how this affects people of different circumstances. So we have a wonderful panel which includes researchers as well as folks who run organizations who are working on the ground throughout the states to try and affect a better reality when it comes to gender pay equity. And this is going to be moderated by an economics reporter for the Wall Street Journal Anna Louis Sussman who will give brief introductions for all of our panelists. You should have picked up a biography page which gives you extensive biographical information for each of our speakers today along with their Twitter handles if you would like to follow them or live tweet the event. So I'll turn it over to Anna. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you everyone. And I'm very honored to introduce our panelists. I'll start with Latifah Lyles. She's the director of the Women's Bureau at the Department of Labor where she works to advance and improve standards practices and opportunities for women in the labor force. We also have Sarita Gupta. She's executive director of jobs with justice and co-director of caring across gender She's a nice expert on the economic, labor and political issues affecting work people across all industries particularly women and those employed in low-age sectors you know there's a huge caring economy I hope that's going to be part of our discussion today. Heidi Hartman is president of the Institute for Women's Policy Research if you've ever read anything about these issues you probably come across her work. The IWPR is a scientific research organization that she founded in 1987 to meet the need for women-centered policy-oriented research and I'd be curious to hear from her just how she's seen the field evolve you know over the years because there's like there's more discussion about this than ever and research and data is a big part of that. And then this gold senior economist here at the Economic Policy Institute she joined in 2003 and her research areas include wages, poverty, inequality, economic mobility and health care and she's one of the lead authors of some of the the report we're going to be discussing today and she's got some new tools to show us I think. All right so Elise you're going to kick us off. Thank you and thanks everyone for being so exciting to have such a great event and thanks to everyone who's watching on live stream right now. I want to just take a minute to thank my co-authors Jessica Sheeter and Kathleen Geyer on the report that we'll be discussing today and in my time allotted I'm going to discuss two key principles that I think we want to keep in mind behind our investigation into the gender wage gap and then give you some basic statistics that we'll be talking about throughout the morning. To start with there are lots of different ways to measure the gender wage gap you've probably seen any number of these over the past several years different ways that researchers have looked at the gender wage gap and the fact is that because there are different measures some people may claim that oh there is no gender wage gap or there's some uncertainty about the wage gap but the fact is that different gender wage gaps are answered to different questions it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist or it isn't real it is very much real and in our paper what we're trying to look at is the different ways to measure it and what those might be answering questions to. One of the key questions people often say is that if you look at the raw gap you're not adjusting for different occupations or different choices that women and men might make in the labor force but and it does however remain the case that men and women in neighboring cubicles doing the same work or on an assembly line right next to each other they are simply not paid the same that gender wage gap exists that exists within jobs it exists within occupations and that differential pay for equivalent work is important but this is a limited view of the role of gender discrimination it doesn't take into account occupational segregation which is often based on a lifetime of her occupational choice is the culmination of years of education guidance by mentors expectations set by those who raised her hiring practices of firms and widespread norms and expectations about work family balance held by employers co-workers and society at large so those are the two key principles that are going to be going through what we're going to be talking about today and went through the report i'm going to give you some basic statistics that you can sort of hold on to as we think about this issue at EPI we tend to focus on hourly wages that's what we do in most of the research we do whenever it's possible well that may miss the gap due to differential hours because some women distribution work fewer hours than the male counterparts and that's real and that's part of the gender wage gap when we look at all those different questions you can ask i really believe that the hourly wage measure gets down to the woman is paid compared to a man when you use that measure typical women or women the men women at the middle of the hourly wage distribution are paid 83 cents to the male dollar so that's the key number underlying what we are studying over the last 35 years or so as you can see in this picture there has been some progress so that 83 cents on the dollar started at much lower in 1979 but much of the progress has really stalled in the last decade the wage gap is smaller for low wage workers likely due to the fact that we have a wage floor namely the minimum wage that i've kept wages of men and women at the bottom to be much closer than those at the middle or the top women at the top that this represents the 95th percentile are paid 74 cents on the male dollar a much larger gap at the top than at the middle or at the bottom and they've seen slower progress in closing the gap than those at the middle and this is likely due to inflexible long hours required of some of those occupations at the top differences in likely hit a promotion and overall occupational differences women of color face an even larger wage penalty compared to white men adding in another layer of discrimination as well as occupational segregation further occupational segregation by race and by gender for instance what i'm showing here black women face a 35 percent wage penalty or they're earning 65 cents on the dollar that equates to seven dollars and 30 cent an hour less pay than the equivalent not the equivalent than white men in general so it's a big pay gap for white women even bigger for black women and even bigger for Hispanic women it's also clear from a deep look at the data is that women can't simply educate themselves out of the gender wage gap not only are women now more educated than men they have higher rates of college completion and advanced education the gender wage gap actually widens at higher levels of educational attainment in fact if you were to look in a regression model one that does control for certain characteristics like demographic controls or educational attainment the gender wage gap is even larger than the raw one because of those higher levels of educational achievements women can't educate themselves out of this gender wage gap as i'm sure you're aware i could talk for hours about different statistics i'm going to give you one more to chew on before we move on our other panelists what you see here is these are different ages across the bottom what you see here is that over a woman's life the gender wage gap grows furthermore what's very clear here and and shocking really is that over a woman's life um if you look at she ages her wages plateau interlate thirties early forties as men's wages continue to rise and a lifetime of lower wages means lower living standards and lower economic security and retirement so it's has long lasting effects throughout the age distribution and over a woman's lives i'm going to turn it over to our next speaker thank you i love data so i was looking at the graphs uh is a is a microphone working okay good i followed the first direction um first of all thank you to elise and to epi for inviting me it's always a pleasure to be on a panel with such experts on the wage gap as latifah and serita and anna i think has also learned quite a bit about it in her reporting uh so we have a really great panel that i'm pleased to be a part of i think it's a great overview of of the reasons for the wage gap all the issues that are involved in the wage gap and i i congratulate epi for producing it i wanted to take some time for society and uh some solutions that we've been working on at the institute for women's policy research as an indicator of the size of the problem uh we decided to calculate for the nation and for each state separately what would happen and we looked at men that had the same educational level the same age which is kind of a proxy for experience because a lot of the data sets we have don't have years of experience in the labor market um and we controlled for hours worked actually just as um the the epi study does and we found that um working women's poverty would fall by half the the number of them that are in poverty would fall by half and this is true for all working women taken together single moms so we could reduce the poverty of working single moms by half married women and single self-supporting women we did exclude uh so when we when we did this particular study and um this is a huge anti-poverty remedy you know there isn't any other remedy we know of that that gets gets rid of half of poverty other than just giving everybody money which of course i'm also in favor of but you know um and this is true even in reasons like the south where you would think it might not be true because wages are so low there's so few little union representation but even in a southern state like mississippi if you've paid women the same as men for the same educational qualifications and so on that half of that also would get women out of uh poverty by half and we reduce poverty by half and also if we did this across the country we would have um economic growth we'd be adding to gdp about the size of the state of virginia um we didn't and to do to get this half result we didn't make women work full time if they were working part time they kept working part time so there were a lot of things we we didn't do we just gave them pay with um but the real question of course is how to do that i mean it's easy to say oh well we'll just give women equal pay with men of course there's millions of employers um as we see from this paper there are millions of issues um in this paper um api notes that occupational segregation alone accounts for about a third of the wage gap and the rest is within occupations which is a lot of that is also segregation it's segregation by industry and segregation by firm uh many women lawyers can't get into the top law firms or fewer of them get into the top law firms uh they don't become corporate counsel as much as men they may wind up of being judges which is now a low paid and high share of judgeships now as compared to 20 or 30 years ago they may teach law they may work at a very small law firm uh so they're in essentially different industries within uh in which the legal occupation works and the same is true for a secretary a secretary who social service taken care of uh that helps poor clients is not likely to make as much as a secretary working for general motors so the differences by by are also quite significant and so um we we recently uh did did a study to um to look at that uh because we we thought that that would be you know part of where the irritation that the epi paper makes to Francine Blau and Larry Kahn's work they say that 50 percent of the wage gap could be attributable to both occupation and industry differences combined so we um also have done a lot of research on IWPR at the fact that women's occupations involved in those occupations that many of the same skills and abilities um that women deploy in their current jobs if they were deployed in many other jobs that men do they would be getting paid a lot more and um it's not with and this is even if in that occupation they would make less than the men it's still a gain from the women's occupation uh that they were in and so we were trying to figure out a way to get uh to identify which high paying occupations and which high paying industries women's jobs would already have a lot in common with uh jobs that they already have that can help them move into these better paying jobs and so we did this study which is called Pathways to Equity and I left a bunch of copies of our various things out there um one of our favorite things that we did just produce some fact sheets for them that they could use at cocktail parties during the election season so we also put this out front five ways to win an argument about the gender wage gap so we have quite a few things out there for you our mansplainer but taking a look more seriously at our Pathways to Equity report um we did this study with Mark Bendick a well-known economist in the field of ODET I think it describes something like 6000 smaller level occupations used to be called the dictionary of occupational titles when there were 10 000 occupations but I think they're down to 6000 now and they actually study those occupations and we were able to combine those into about um just less than 500 of the census defined occupations so that we could see who's working in them are women working in them minority women minority men white men who's working in them now we specifically jobs in three industries manufacturing IT and transportation and um we only looked at jobs that were growing and that would pay and we often found that women in women's jobs in those same industries had almost all the same skills as the men and the men's jobs in the same industries that were getting paid a lot more and and we feel that many employers you know are constantly claiming we don't know how valid these claims are but let us admit that they claim that they cannot have these uh semi-skilled jobs good middle wage jobs you don't that don't require a four-year college degree and they can't find people to fill them and we're like well just look under your nose it's a women but they don't think in their firm and that's like a whole different category to them and they don't even realize that the skills skills might uh overlap so just as an example uh one job packing machine operators typical job that we were measuring 26 000 a year if she became a welder ah she could make 39 it turns out that although a lot of them are in the same industry there's also kind of universal feeder jobs and one of those universal feeder jobs is cooks cooks have a lot in common with factory work for example um uh it's physically arduous actually and uh there are many different uh higher paying jobs and in skilled manufacturing that cooks for example they're making um 24 000 a year now uh with just a little bit of on-the-job training they could become quality and control inspectors making 39 000 a year they make about uh 29 000 a year eight eight out of ten are female and they're almost all using computers today right you go to your local library branch and you want something and check it out on the computer for you and an IT support specialist who makes 53 000 well for a library assistant to make 53 000 in the library world they have to finish their BA they have to get their masters they have to have 10 years of experience and eventually they'll get to fit computer work you know they could get to 53 000 by becoming an IT specialist so these are the kinds of things um we've we've been looking at our website that specializes in this study called women and goodjobs.org and it just lists a lot of occupations and shows you know what the what the how how that occupation could uh become an on-ramp to other but none of them require in college and we think this is the kind of thing we have to be looking at we have to be looking at moving women from the jobs where they are to the jobs where they could be and I think we found that if we move something like this is a model and I think we found if we move something like 10 percent of women over the next five years for those women their wages would practically double so it's it's a really pretty strong remedy and you know so this is my closing remark you might have heard about it in the news the group came from the UN sponsored by the UN they were from different countries and they came to see how women were doing in the United States and then they wrote this report and they said right so I was in one of the last meetings with them with a whole bunch of women's rights activists and um the group was asked well how can we get women into other jobs uh mail instead of we don't know we don't know we don't know how to do that it was all about equal pay but but the same law Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act forbids discrimination both in who you hire for what then remedies are you know kind of the same through enforcement but we kind of viewed this type of study as a catalyst to kind of get employers to do the right thing voluntarily move into a better job with just by looking around for something compatible and maybe getting a little bit of extra training like a course or two at a community college so um that's the trick is how to how to get that equal pay hi so again I want to thank EPI and Elise for for this panel and for the report which is very comprehensive and very timely and is very about there's a couple of points I'm going to make one is looking at the cultural things that are a little bit less easy to quantify but we all what happens in workplaces what is the workplace culture that contribute to uh what we're talking about today whether it's decision making implicit bias um a perception off ramp also um the other piece of of that is there's a lot of discussion about what other types of policies intersect that could play and families that never have kids under 18 who have a variety of of needs for child care for example but of course elder care as well um a major shift um since the single households households with single parents with children under 18 so this this proposition that we are fix a fix a problem um that that exists that's sort of situational or that this is sort of uh you know when this happens the reality is that you know most people are going to have children have some type of um need to leave the workforce and one of the contributors that is is often talked about to the wage gap is of course that well women don't work as many years even so a lot of the comp the compound to do with uh you know you know waiting hours or leaving the workforce coming back into the workforce shorten hours during caregiving or just time off for caregiving and as you know we don't have any national policies that really that that's not money that most americans or most workers are recouping years is is much more significant than the average working women in her prime and so obviously a lot of you probably already know that you know one of the major major conversations right now is what kind of policies uh need to be in place for other countries that have these supportive programs like paid leave and child care have a much higher labor labor force participation uh rate for women and we know also that if we uh there's estimations that we could in the workplace uh compared to other countries like Canada if we had the presence of for example paid leave and child care so what does that mean that means that there are more women working there won't more accounting themselves out and not being penalized for caregiving the other piece of the caregiving that I want to just just sort of tack tack on to is you know this we talk about but there is a discrimination piece of caregiving so there's this gender discrimination but I think for men and women there's a conversation that I think people are starting you're a caregiver what does that look like is it clear do you understand that you know um if I have children do I talk about it in an interview if I have uh kids to take you know to sign up for a project or do I think I'm going to be negatively viewed because I come with a set of responsibilities that are going to take me ultimately from the studies on you know what it is what does it mean to to to have a very very strong work life and a very strong work life balance and I think where we have a conversation is really more about a workplace standard I just as just as we wouldn't expect someone to come to work when they're sick we wouldn't expect someone to come to work you know two weeks after they have anxiety we're missing a very critical point in whether or not we're talking about equalizing wages or the number of hours women and men work I think that we're still thinking about opposed to a reality of of the culture of work today and the culture is is is even more important because we know that even when these policies exist they're or there's an economic consequence if I decide to take leave or to take advantage of this perk that my office has and so what is it how do we value ourselves not to be too touchy-feely about it but the reality is that we you know we employ people and people have lives and responsibilities and I think this is where when you start this conversation about wages and wage equality in a lot of instances in most instances that I've experienced both both Fortune 500 do the right thing that is not the case that you know there's there's a sort of denial of the fact that I may have a wage inequality problem a lot of employers are surprised frankly a lot of employers don't know what to do but they're open to what they can do as you do provide transparency about their company's earnings of course that's just one step that doesn't solve the problem but we know that the cultural this idea that you know this is an institutional problem we can't fix I think is long past as more and more companies say I can invariably say you know there's some underlying things that we can't fix right away and you see like a lot of examples of that I think in the in the larger the larger sphere right now um so and I think Heidi touched on this a little bit um is that there are 7.7 million women who are working mothers who are have children that um equalizing normalizing dealing with occupational segregation and discrimination will in fact and absolutely affect a matter of choice and some people say well how do we get men to to be excited and interested and want to obviously you know you're the average man because it's a matter of survival and I think that this idea that you know there's a there's a choice that I am made that I am making less money is really I don't have I have a choice to make less money is really a false one and I think it's connected to our expectation was what it means to be a worker and think that we often make people or force people or try to false people to make force people to make false choices this is just another one of them um and the more we talk about and we I think we're going to talk the solution so I won't go too much into the policy ramifications or implications and ideas but I think that you know there's definitely a connection to what you know how I feel about my job how I feel about my wages and what kind of benefits I have and we know that a lot of nation I might say I'll take the the paid health care and and the free child care and the paid leave and you know I know that I'm going to probably use it more than other people so that I made and so there's a lot of of individual choices playing into it but it's not because these are choices that we think people really should have I think that how and in balance and value their workers is really key and I think you know later we can talk a little about what this means but I think the value we're putting on the squeaky wheel and negotiation are not so critical and obviously there's a lot of reports and studies out there that show women being negatively impacted when they try to negotiate it's a double-edged sword there's lots of reports for a lot of average women there's a lot of pitfalls it's absolutely a double-edged sword for a lot of working moms ultimately negotiation and perceived aggressiveness when it comes to trying to get more money is certainly something that we know counts what can we do to sort of balance the level of the playing field knowing that that is for a lot of reasons not the answer but it certainly can just you know be a stronger advocate for myself I could solve this problem individually and I think when we get to the policy solutions later we can sort of talk about other ways I can fix the wage gap is something that you know we we we try to debunk but we know it also it's it's harder in the early stages because people don't work in your career it's not something you see wrap the gate but those decisions you make in those first few years are very critical and those those norm sorry I'm getting the yank thanks is that why you're standing there my name is Saritha Goptham the executive director of job suggestives and co-director caring across generations and I do want to thank Elise very much for this incredible panel and frankly there's so much that's been said already that's like the bad part of when I actually touch upon a few elements of Elise's report and I'll focus a bit on on low wage workers and the impact on low age women um workers um but lifted up was that the wage gap is actually um the smallest among the lowest earning women workers because really the minimum wage does create a floor for wage gap affects low wage workers less um for working women who are barely making ends me life is so complicated that we've heard already like having to choose between paying for rent paying their bills paying for food paying for child care um and so much more they're just growing facing impossible choices um the second point I want to make is that uh Elise also lifted up the effects of the gender building upon some of the points that Latifa made I mean I think that care economy really does illustrate the problem of the wage gap for women unpaid family caregivers so just to take a moment to talk about this as care workers um who are disproportionately women and people of color whose skills and dedication we rely on to care for our our love to us highly vulnerable conditions um and for poverty wages and you know care is one of the fastest growing sectors of our economy right undervalued um and many of these poorly paid women must balance again their low paying jobs while also striving to prevent provide for in the story of a friend of mine uh her name is Melissa Benjamin and Melissa is a mom of two from Denver who has worked as a home care provider for more than 16 years um as she watched her mother rehabilitate her seriously injured brother despite 16 years of allowed her to adequately take care of her family she says the hardest part of serving as a nursing assistant isn't caring for her patient low pay no paid sick leave and limited health insurance and when asked about the hardest part of her job for the pay the lack of benefits no sick time a few months ago I was sick enough that I needed to walk with a cane and I was still working as I mean Melissa I think you need a nurse without sick days low pay no benefits literally and the disabled and I worry about what's going to happen to me when I turn 80 and I don't purchase a cane myself but how do I do that when I get paid minimum wage so the ground is we attempt to work on these issues and as I said this is one of the fastest growing quality of these jobs to make them more sustainable and to ensure quality care for our loved ones and exploding baby boomers are rapidly aging and living longer than any previous generation and when a first wave of millennials are having children four million new kids a year and four three so the care needs are really exploding there are growing about 43 and a half million those of us who are family caregivers in the sandwich generations raising our own little children really feel it and as Latifah mentioned there's a whole host of issues for women who leave the workforce to care for their loved ones and for the women who have to hold down tonality of this issue with so many other issues is really important for us to take into consideration here among caregivers ages 50 to 64 years old an estimated 60 percent are working full or part-time the needs of caregivers and to strengthen our care infrastructure and we can certainly talk about this we have to make visible the care economy and we need to really think about the care infrastructure that we're we're building right now to build the kind of infrastructure that both creates good care jobs good well paid families that families have the support that they need to make good choices and have affordable and accessible choices for the types to that I think a third point I wanted to raise is that a major another major problem that we see around in terms such as restaurants according to the national women's law center women make up 70 percent of the many of you know is currently is a poultry seven dollars and 25 cents but the tipped minimum wage is the third of American families live below the poverty line and have no national paid sick an entire paycheck and women working in tipped jobs are making just two dollars and 13 cents an hour the kind of formula for success so in states we're beginning to see advocates like the restaurant opportunities the tipped minimum wage at the federal level of federal level of course congress can pass legislation and as the national women's law center points out states that require companies to pay tipped workers the same or wage gap than states that follow the federal model so that's something for us to really think about um point which is that Elise's report makes clear that there is less of a wage gap within unionized workplaces and industries than there is gap for women in unions is half of what it is in non-union jobs and this makes sense right because shouldn't standardizing pay so that employers cannot compensate people at different rates while they're doing similar work and working people to be able to join together in union to negotiate for better wages and working conditions so fun about the gender wage gap has to be part of a bigger uh connected to a much broader discussion about how we're breaking down multiple economically secure lives that allow them to both be be able to bring their talents into our economy and be part of the workforce in a meaningful way and be able to sustain and support their families as well thanks thank you we do you hear um i'm just going to take a quick moment to talk about um you heard a hint of a calculator that we have and i'm going to leave it right is the growing wedge between typical workers compensation and economy wide productivity so at the same time that the gender wage gap persisted persisted this gap has so while the gender wage gap is a serious economic challenge and we absolutely need to do everything we can all the tools in our toolbox to try to minimize that equality and one way to think about that is um is that we made in closing the gender wage gap of the median since 1979 was due to men's wages actually declining this is not the best way to really close it thinking about lowering the wages um so while remedying gained simply because male wages dropped is no cause for celebration the fact is that our economy has raised substantial wage gains for all workers both men and women and this figure shows just how high they could be if both the gender wage disparities have been closed today and if the economy had generated wage growth so if the gender wage gap were closed and the economy's gains were broadly shared then women today typical women today um notably men's hourly wages but also be much higher they'd be 40 percent higher today the API is we have created a new calculator and um I suggest you go the first step shows you what the gender wage gap has meant for your wages and the second step shows it's between wage growth and productivity over the last generation has meant so in the first step you look at what you could be making you input some individual statistics so the graph a little more sense of what this means for you personally so you input your gender you can input your age or I'll just use an exam degree and then you can input a salary or you can input your hourly pay and you know calculate your you scroll through it and it can calculate how gender affects your pay so for a woman who's making 50 it's an incomparable man again that's a man with similar education and age to her falls similarly in the wage distribution and is paid close to $64,000 compared to a woman and then um as I've just said there's more for our economy we want to think more broadly we want to close the gender wage gap and we want to think of a way to reverse animation here and I'll walk you through it it used to be that when the economy grew everyone's wages but around 40 years ago while productivity kept growing wages for most people flatlined so you see that the extra money go at the same time pay for the top 1% skyrocketed growing much faster than the on there what does that mean for your pay what could your pay or people like you be making if today is making $50,000 a woman who's about 40 years old with a college degree could be making close to $33,000 that's a raise of about 65% are you going to be writing checks to everyone so if you're a man you might also find this calculator interesting um let's say you're a man who is 50 you make close to $40,000 you can look at how more you're going to be earning about $9,000 $8,500 more than a comparable woman there depending on where you fall in the in the gender in the pay spectrum you may be getting that bonus as well so if you if we hadn't seen that growing inequality you could be making more than $60,000 wage gap so women and men that same part of the wage distribution would be earning the same amount our api and we love to talk about our rigorous methods you can also go on here and look and answer questions about that as well thank you I'm going to start off by being that man at the cocktail party who needs to be but I think you mentioned there's um certain jobs that require longer hours um you know dinner with my clients all the time if they have a question only I can answer it I'm putting in all these long hours and I don't get to the highly compensated um you know I was wondering one of you could address that or you know one the other unless what's my incentive to offer her 20 percent more or um you know as I was thinking about this relationship aspect of a lot of the more highly uh it's client facing where you're soliciting business or you're developing these relationships um care work obviously um you know you may need to know someone's medications or how to get around their home so why haven't we seen this person as relationships so we need to make sure that we retain them or we compensate them for them well partly I think that in my you know believe that these long hours are created to reserve these jobs for men uh I I think this country well we have a very um insecure economic social welfare states and much more labor union representation of people don't run as while they're gone their office might be moved to the basement they might lose their window anything could happen or they could just go afraid and in that context it's easy for um employers to demand these long these jobs done there have been some economists that look at um you know the equipment the uh well you know you can also have an equilibrium point of short hours where you don't see any difference in the cost so I think that it's uh it is a broad spread cultural issue and that at the high end we have especially compared to what people are doing in other countries and what is the point you know these are not working those kinds of hours so I think it's something particular to our whole way of being here which is a very economically insecure it's just a different culture that we have here and it's difficult to um say that you know part of the reason why we can pay women less is that they are excluded from higher paying jobs in particular may not have other options these are the jobs they can get they may love the job many of them do that's because they don't have to be paid more because there are enough of them apparently available large employers of them many of them do work for large companies there could be some an option the element I mean that's certainly a possibility I'll add one thing there's certainly the the possibility that you know we change the conversation that is something that would permeate and you know affect the workplace culture and I think this this this discrimination is a caregiver than perhaps that workplace culture that you have going on won't just be a problem for women but again that's that's we change that there are a lot of you know heads of companies who who try to do this from the top it doesn't know who are in charge of people uh to to to adhere to a high standard you know paying someone less I think that's a really low bar and you know I think wants would not want that association or that label or this you know this this idea because they can I think we want to buy workers we want to have people who are wedded to our companies and committed to high road companies know that and know how to to to level the playing field and think about what they're not negotiation is even has a place in the workplace um there's some companies to you know say that you know we're not going to use negotiation as the top um you know the look at who's doing the work and doing the work and who should be valued so that's just a couple of points um you know because it's an economic question really so if employers are trying to find the best people to do their job long hours as a signal for productivity when it's actually a very correctly who's going to be more productive and so we need to change the game um you know if we think about productivity or that 80th hour you're more productive in fact the research shows the opposite um that you actually are going to be more productive with pointing out we could have a different system that rewards that when we see that let's say in um how many hours I actually kill not trying to you know make such a huge point there that you know that in the extreme but it's not about having labor standards that actually do more to dictate hours we have now changed personally would have loved to see that up higher into the into the salary ranges um to be able to take the bottom line so I just wanted to add that and also I didn't get a chance to before us you guys were all laughing and it worked really hard on that Teresa Kroger, Dan Estrow and Eric Shansby so thank you all. Peace because a lot of this has been said I just think caregiving is really complicated culturally you know like I know like father with Alzheimer's that I care for um I've made a choice to talk about it but most people don't talk about what the implications of that are so there's something about how we take this issue like when I'm in rooms and oh my god I'm so glad you said that or they say I don't even identify as a caregiver and listen to cultural norms that have been set that we actually need to disrupt in this moment and and care receiving frankly out into the public and actually think through the solution because we really need as a nation to figure out broader solutions to this over time I mean a huge advance that we've made at least in the context of caregiving a role in helping to advance but this was really important to finally acknowledge to actually attain minimum wage and overtime protections which had not been the case right that these were workers who were considered you know were largely black women centuries the ideal policies due to compromises political compromises and so here's there is a whole and so much of that you know the home care rule is the step that is helping to address then there's so much more we can do the caregiving relationships because your question is exactly right I if we have a caregiver taking care of knows and understands who he is what his needs are so what are we as a nation going to do to make sure that job is a sustainable job when the overtime role was approved or passed or I want there's a lot of individuals as you mentioned who are doing this as a family and making these decisions and having to come for nannies or for elder care and then there's you know this is coming out of we were to say you know double the wages or raise the wages of these people to something that would be considered family so I have peers to pay $40,000 a year to someone to take care of their kids that you know for for our government budgets where would that extra money come from we've been helping to drive a campaign called caring across generations which is focused on this and what we're and that states are beginning to develop model policies and get at this question so there's a lot of really interesting work happening in states like Hawaii and Michigan and Maine where there's a lot in relationship to providing support to families and to be able to pay the workforce I will also say what we're is people families will say to us this is great if you can help me solve how we're going to need to figure out how I'm going to pay for child care and how I'm going to get paid leave and so our infrastructure we really actually we're our care system right now and have families and so we really have to take a strong look at the universal family care like what would it mean for a family to be able to access child care when they need in this country and so part of what we're finding is to say we can't hit these issues against each other actually in the context of the budget fights and the how interconnected these needs are and then what's the system that's best that are worth looking at that I think can really create the momentum for us at the federal level for example there's there's been an initiative called keep me what happened in Maine was that there was an increase in Medicaid dollars for ages of home care workers to ensure that more older and aging could live in place in their homes at the same time that this boards and subsidies for senior housing so that that aging adults could actually afford now they're they're doing a whole other piece connected to take keep me home so in that state right now there's some interesting conversations and they're moving and so there's a tremendous it's an example of where and in some cases in that in that case the the advocates on the ground decided to figure out these questions of raising the wages eliminating the tipped wage in the state and creating attention to right now Hawaii is another one where there's a lot of looking at a for the care sure that aging of care support that they need for up to 365 days a year so state is different in terms of the revenue question those are a few thank you you or it was um I think usually when we talk about the the pay gap is a lot of numbers you know we have a focal point of this report all the things that come before women and men even enter the work do we still call that discrimination do we still call that the wage gap I mean you know when we talk about the rate who you know points to all the different disadvantages that he compares you know blacks social and other kind of structural factors should be kind of economic sense of institutional racism or institutional uh sexism I think this a lot on earth do you have to pay them anything and uh it's it's uh that idea and it's hard to change these cultural beliefs and ideas setting in the states is very exciting I think many states that California is one who figured out years ago that to give care in the home that it is to send older people to nursing home to save money by doing a different form of care but of course there isn't haven't allocated enough money and but other countries are doing this in Japan as I understand it have a rapidly growing population with a lot of young people they have a dearth of um because they don't want to give up their careers as is common in Japan so cultural problems but uh on the on the schools and the racism issue you know and blacks started to graduate from high school at the same rate as as whites I admire mr fry as a researcher um so there's just all raising people you know who have made an accomplishment and we say all and it's it's unfortunate and so I think we have to always be you know very aware so I would add to that certainly I think your if your question is about what's happening before you know there's a lot to be said for for the cultural norm you probably know about we're getting related to women and educational higher education outpacing um and so you know if women are the education gap is not the different the spectrum on education where women are attaining degrees there are a lot of areas where women are computer science for example and others uh despite the fact that we have a really humongous about and we are just starting to scratch the surface and we have this tremendous education and and then uh attainment and the workforce and economic security and there's a lot of the discrimination piece I think is very strong and I think it's important to use that question certainly um whether or not they bring a case or not but we we know that one of the women on the job at all levels of of of the the economic discrimination because they're pregnant in the workplace and I think that um is there there are there are a couple of wasting problems as more women work um and more women come into the workforce with higher level one more one more comment on that I think it's absolutely important you're talking about the carryover workforce and how the teachers and nurses um what we also find in the research is that as professions become equals and so um that devaluation is is important in terms of looking at all these professions you're you know now lowering the pay because there are more women in it so that's and um you mentioned pregnancy discrimination um you pointed in um you know so much of I think what the care decisions you talked about these are personal stories and personal decisions you're talking to to people who are resistant to these ideas to you know where is the opening to become um more prevalent um where are the openings where are the most resistant well now I think we have a great opening I saw um Barbara Beck Aaron Reich's Facebook page feminist credit her with the joke and uh you know at literally millions of women have told stories of how they have been harassed generally um and uh you know we on the job men can be harassed on the job as well uh women are you know uh very often not reported horrible long-term effects on them but they the only way to survive is to kind of like that's why uh Trump was able to do so well in the debates because other men don't don't have just ignoring that crap and they they tried to you know argue with him uh but assaulted um everywhere on the street on the job and uh and um so I think that we have an opportunity now to do something to really look at what is the extent of this and I think that opening or the opportunity gone they do want to stop it because this is an area where they can really be sued and it can um sex discrimination claims that surface that the EOC and that's you know rather than equal pay or promotion I mean they can be related of course and risk for them and all of them know that if if there's a history that was not given if a case is brought so I think that this is an opportunity now that would work and instead yes this happens to me many times to work um you know move into better jobs more responsible jobs um um being the woman from getting the next better job it keeps women self I wanted to just point out on the opening a little different thing one is page transparency so states passing their own transparency laws 13 states plus the district of Columbia uh now do not a widely studied area so we don't have a lot of data about how those transparency laws are ultimately here and there but it's not something we know a lot about yet but we do know that beyond just the that there are a lot of companies who are also doing this it's a it's a good first step it was a key tenet where um you know it's a it's a major um equalizer certainly companies federal government have a smaller wage gap and there's some assumptions and conclusions that part of the the smaller the transparency in their jobs and I think that generally you know people are open to talking about that it's another cultural shift what is that 50 percent of a recent I don't know how recent it was me the last five years sorry talk about how people really believe that they have policy at all um and so that's a real problem if we're to fix this problem if this is another area just to add where the requirement against people who share pay information yeah and just to build upon that for a second I mean I do think to be in openings and opportunities for us to really think about how to protect working people from being retaliation is a huge issue as we've heard and there's important opportunities like the wage act protections for all workers and then certainly um certainly for immigrant workers who who sort of threats uh to deportation and whatnot um that we see playing out so that's one presentation which is pathways to good jobs family sustaining jobs and so I do think communities around I would just also lift up um we're going to be releasing a report in a couple of weeks about of apprenticeship and training programs that have helped women to help be a part of campus in um Massachusetts but like what it really took and what were the experiences of the employers themselves and the city and others to really come together and figure out how and work gross encounter hostility absolutely absolutely how did you approach that but I think um really uh enforcement being huge ensuring uh that one the money that was flowing to create these programs really happened not they're not perfect uh cases but there are growing cases and I think this is an industry that we change generational shifts in the industry there's going to be lots of openings and opportunities um workers I think there's tremendous work being done to improve the quality of low wage jobs and and enough hours of work and so we've seen incredible work happening helping 40 000 retail workers really get to a place of having a campaign was one there but these things again are very connected to adding up giving the kind of stability and security that they need um and be able to begin to address do we have a mic that's going to go around or yes we do okay great hi my name is Emily liner if you all have a research to wish list of what we could do next on the gender pay gap for example about occupation versus occupation like for example I found that the average median weekly if email workers is 17 percent lower than occupations with more male workers but job titles and a lot of the publicly available data and um so for particularly for you needs to be able to communicate what's going on with the gender pay gap more effectively and create change but we are the Department of Labor with the Bureau of Labor Statistics we work very closely with the census and others and since the data we in data we are not collecting about experiences that women have in the workplace and so certainly to some of those questions either through existing surveys or doing supplements or ad hoc surveys when but certainly in some of these areas of uh uh uh discrimination but some of these areas of harassment and our data is not about people's perceptions at all we have a couple of surveys we're going to Gallup server right now about women's perception and then I would also say too that um you know the effect of and I know Heidi is has one of the only plays out but I do think as as folks continue to push the policy side of anti-ritalia at the local level and even at the firm level uh to to some extent would I think help Okay folks, any other research points? Uh ma'am in the front This is from Ms. Gupta. You mentioned the legacy of slavery, can you? For um so uh during the new deal fishing through um the basics of what have what is the Fair Labor Standards Act and what is with Southern politicians at that time uh the agreement was to um which were really the slave labor in the U.S. continued we it it took us up until two years ago three years ago to actually acknowledge the slice of domestic work um that should in fact be protected under basic farm workers are left out of these basic labor protections as well. I don't know if this is what oh there we go if you look at the audience here that is 70 percent female and I assume that many um that um you know the way to start you talked about transparent and I'm curious about accountability for progressive organizations I'm the head of a progress in itself in the industry and um I don't find that I have cocktail party to say here are five things let's see if you talked about having transparency standards I don't even know what I should so I guess my question is you know with EPI and with um for our peers who I think are well-meaning um but without accountability to point out is the so one of the things and thank you for the panelists are highlighting a lot of the administration but one recent thing is um and it's really geared toward the private sector but it doesn't need to be a women's summit which was in the area of equal pay and for employers who wanted to start this and in in firms and to be public about and those were the three growing lists of of companies most of them are high level but we know that there are other cities and states like Boston the Boston compact where there's local Boston companies who are also agreeing to a set of standards looking questions since you know employers are are varied and certainly the effort has been focused on private sector but certainly I think in you know also coming from a nonprofit background I do believe that there is a there's a benefit to broadening that to all employers not just looking at these these private sector firms but there are definitely some good standards in there and I think um the important part of it is for this exercise too is this company saying I look at me I'm doing this I know it's a first step but I'm at least agreeing to the principles knowing that this is a journey or process and there's some acknowledgement of that and they think that that sends a signal to the the employees and it also sends a signal to the managers so things that you can do as the president of organization or top down or constituency and supporting each other an interesting solidarity I'm just wondering yeah I mean I think the number one thing on the list I think would be actually to help create a unionized workforce I really think that unions in this country the decline of unions has not only hurt wages for the vast majority we also know that unions can as was mentioned earlier unions can close that gender wage gap because you are sending standards within an organization that a job is paid a certain amount regardless of race gender you know other other considerations so I think that also that gives workers a voice within the workplace to not only bid up their wages give them that bargaining power but also help with that that equality so that would be the top of my list I think it would be possible that we have a lot of non-profit coalition organizations for any of them to come out with some standards like that I think that's a great idea the standards on the amount of paid family leave would be very welcome I think because I think groups are all over the map and I have friends calling me up and saying well what do you do at your place and I tell them and they say oh that's too much I don't want to do that too much and I'm like well we have to do a lot because we study it we can't we can't be somebody not doing a lot we have very few contractors you know very few consultants mostly salaried employees don't nonprofits have a huge gender pay gap this something came out of last year from an HR consultancy or something that nonprofits have a really large well they they especially you know between nonprofits there's the low wage nonprofits that are in social services and higher wage nonprofits but there was a particular study done in Pittsburgh which showed might be of interest to you CEOs of nonprofits the women on average made less than the men for the same size budget same number of workers and the best way to raise your wage in case this is a problem for you it worked for me is to by accident it happened by accident and I didn't know about this result until after it happened but the best thing is to make sure that the head of your HR committee comes from a different industry than your own and is a male so but you know they did a quite thorough study in in the Pittsburgh area about this and we don't have a national study like that that would be useful but nonprofits are kind of you know very hard to define I mean even though we have centers at universities now that study them and study the sector I'm still not seeing enough data you know coming out really because we're not in the there's no box to click off in the year in your report when you file your your business report I think I'm just on the oh sorry I'm sorry for one more question I was just going to say also on family leave I think I mean there's a cultural issues there as well I think that taking the lead and encouraging one of the reasons it's so important that it's paid is not only so that women and families have economic security it's also to make sure that men are taking it and so changing the culture and setting an example having men be offered that leave and take that leave and that can help change that culture of work and help with work family balance and also you know help with the gender wage gap sorry do we have any questions from men this one in the corner good afternoon I'm Jordan Sellers with FJS Health and Skelter Politics and Social Science we're just a local think tank my question was kind of two parts the first part was kind of dealing with industry and where we're at now in terms of economic equality so I was thinking about the industry case with Plessy versus Ferguson and they kind of like did separate but equal and they started to see a change in that particular industry and I wonder now are those types of things spilling over into industry would you know help yourself initiatives or campaigns and signs like that or posters that are up in workplaces or other posters and signs that you might see up in workplaces like to each their own which kind of does help bring up economic culture to a community when you kind of see sentiments of separate but equal in workplaces you know different environments and then the other part is sexual harassment are there ways in which you could work in an industry and like whether you're a registered sex offender still making those economic inroads into industry too so those are my two questions do you mind rephrasing the first question thank you sorry in short I just want to know what can they do in terms of industry practices that we're taking place during Plessy versus Ferguson when they implemented a separate but equal industry policy system why that we can kind of replicate today in terms of help yourself posters or campaign sounds like that or kind of eat your own and what do you see in terms of economic um nuances in workplaces when you have a policy like separate but equal kind of running industry when you say separate but equal are you talking about occupational segregation as in women being and more likely to be in one industry no do you know if there's a modern or even a 21st and this is what i'm seeing a pattern of how industry has said we've in the past used separate but equal in our industry to kind of help economic growth and I was wondering if you're seeing that same 21st nuance implemented with campaigns like help yourself um to each his own these same type of initiative these same type of sentiments that lead back to an industry that already led in that and said we had you know tremendous changes in our economic growth because we implemented a policy like separate but equal and then the second question was about um registered sex offenders and helping them work and how does that interact with sexual harassment policies no the question is like if you're a registered sex offender what are the inroads for that person to be in the workplace or whatever and helping also with that economic growth with that workforce I have no idea that's really difficult I think that's a really difficult issue the only person I know who's a good friend of mine who was charged with a sexual offense and then was on a sexual offender list went into business for himself and moved to a different state and because his crime wasn't very serious honestly he was able to get obliterated from the list in his new state through an elaborate appeal process I think it's it's very difficult and it's one of the things we probably should look at of how to just do a better job with the whole issue it's very difficult I mean it's very similar to people who have been in jail for whatever crime and then come out and they're pariahs you know they've supposedly they've paid their debt to society but they can't vote they can't do this they can't do that so we have to come up with a more generous and more you know rehabilitative system for all kinds of offenders I would think okay is that all we have time for is there one more question oh sorry there's one very persistent questioner yes hi Jen Erickson with now we have done such a great job of describing the problem and I've been listening to it for about 50 years um I hope we can leap ahead and think about macro solutions a unionization is great but frankly even though I know it's heretical to say it here at EPI that doesn't look like the most expedient solution at the moment I think we have to talk about what sorts of progressive corporate tax policies can we propose to start bringing about equity in the workplace I don't know if EPI is talking about that or IWPR but I think we've got to go that direction I'm thinking we've got a new generation here that seems to be much more interested in equity and I I'm hoping we can give them some some of the ideas that they'll need to go forward with to really start turning things around because left up to the volition of each of these major corporations in this country it's going to take a very long time to see these changes come about I guess I'm a glass half empty person but I do think that corporate tax tax policy reform is it's our best bet and we need to start talking about it that's done as a social insurance system social security is half paid by workers insurance systems that are paid all by employers like workers compensation and so there's no reason that workers have to not share it is true that in the four states I think that have but it doesn't happen and all of these things you know just require most of us many of us in this room spend our lives doing some of us iterations and it just requires I think transactions tax I know everybody has a way to spend that I'd like to see us spend that more taxes on the airwaves I mean there could be lots of you know might not find that that honoris and they might really like getting something Bob Kutner who tells the story you know you'd go to your mechanic with your car that's broken I don't want to fix it you're like no no no I want my car fixed uh that's the thing you need to and I think we can come up with new forms of taxes that people will see to try to take it to an optimistic note Jen yeah also Anna working on this issue in fact the EPI has done a recent primer on corporate taxes just an updated look trying to get the past look at the real data we've also recently done a chart book in conjunction with the progressive group Americans for tax fairness great way these these are both on our website and you should also take a close look for an invitation in the coming days for a conference being spawned in which looks at progressive tax policy of which corporate taxes it's going to be a huge component it's going to be in all right thank you everyone