COLUMBUS – In only eight states is the disparity between what women and men earn wider than it is in Ohio, with full-time working women earning just 75 cents for every dollar paid to their male counterparts, and a couple of lawmakers hope the divide can be narrowed by calling more attention to it.
April 4 is Equal Pay Day, the date that signifies how far into 2017 women have to work to catch up to the wages men earned in 2016.
Full-time working women in Ohio earn 75 cents for every dollar earned by a man and two state lawmakers are hoping their legislation will stir up some talk about closing the pay gap.
Democratic Reps. Janine Boyd of Cleveland and Kent Smith of Euclid recently introduced a bill that would establish a toll-free, anonymous equal-pay hotline operated by The Ohio Civil Rights Commission where workers can discuss possible pay and reporting discrepancies.
“With this 1-800 hotline, hopefully employers will now see that if they are in fact not paying folks equal wages for equal work that there could be some repercussions in the future,” Smith said.
Nationally, women are paid on average 20 percent less than men but the gender gap is wider among non-white women. Black women are paid 37 percent less and Hispanic women are paid nearly half of what men make.
Many analysts say the gap is due to the higher percentage of female workers who are employed in lower-paying service-sector jobs.
Boyd hopes the Equal Pay Hotline boosts efforts to strengthen state and federal laws prohibiting wage discrimination.
“Since my Republican brothers and sisters on the other side of the aisle have not chosen to vote in favor of equal pay for equal work legislation both at the state and federal level, maybe we need to do something like this where we have a hotline set up and we can collect data on the rate of incidents in terms of pay inequity,” she said.
According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, the gender wage gap in Ohio will not close for another 50 years.