COLUMBUS – A group of Ohio Democrats have chosen Equal Pay Day as the right time to introduce a bill they say would help eliminate the wage gap between men and women.
“The wage gap doesn’t just hurt working women, it also affects their families and local communities. As long as pay discrimination persists, we are cheating families out of their full earning potential,” said assistant House Minority Leader Kristin Boggs (D-Columbus).
Equal Pay Day marks the date in 2019 when women have to work to earn the equivalent of their male counterparts’ wages in 2018.
Women make up half the workforce, but get paid 75% of what white men do. It’s bad for women, bad for families and holds our economy back. @EricaCCrawley #EqualPayDay pic.twitter.com/7WIYi3bHfO
— Ohio House Dems (@OHHouseDems) April 2, 2019
Boggs and Rep. Erica Crawley also of Columbus joined several other Democrats state lawmakers in supporting the Ohio Equal Pay Act, which they say will “recognize the full potential of Ohio’s working women.”
According to the Economic Policy Institute, women were paid almost 23 percent less than men in 2018 and the situation is even worse for some minority women. While women on average earn about 77 cents for every dollar a man earns, for black and Hispanic women it’s about 66 cents.
The bill would prohibit gag orders on employees that keep them from discussing salaries with one another, require vendors doing business with the state to grant women equal opportunity for career advancement at their businesses and government employers to evaluate their employees’ pay scales to ensure wages are based on skills, responsibilities and working conditions.
“This is not a women’s issue; this is a human rights issue,” Carolyn Casper, president of the Ohio chapter of the National Organization for Women. “This penalizes our families, it penalizes our community and it’s not an equitable way to treat workers. Our contributions over history have been very significant and they’ve yet to be recognized.”
Casper hopes legislation like the federal Paycheck Fairness Act will help narrow the gap.
Passed last week by the U.S. House, the bill would ban employers from asking job applicants how much they previously made, forbid businesses from retaliating against workers who share wage information, and increase penalties for equal-pay violations.