Labor & Employment Law

90 Years After the Vote, U.S. Women Still Seek Economic Citizenship

By Tula Connell

Women won the right to vote 90 years ago today. As historian Christine Stansell points out, the seemingly “no-brainer” move to ensure women have the same political citizenship rights as men was contested in this country until 1984, when Mississippi became the last state to ratify the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote.

That’s 1984?19 years after the Voting Rights Act and 13 years after 18-year-olds got the right to vote.

Working women today still are fighting for complete citizenship?economic citizenship. The Joint Economic Committee yesterday released a report on economic advances by women over the past quarter century and found that despite a quarter-century of progress, 

challenges remain. Certain industries remain heavily gender-segregated. In addition, millions of women are struggling to juggle work outside the home with family care-giving responsibilities.

Sometime this year, the percentage of women in the U.S. workforce became equal to that of men. Yet, as economists point out, the recent decrease in the pay gap between men and women is a reflection of the loss of pay for men, not an increase for women. Women still only make 78 cents for every dollar a man is paid. Further,

wives’ earnings play an increasingly important role in the families’ incomes. In 1983, wives’ incomes comprised just 29 percent of total family income. By 2008, wives’ incomes comprised 36 percent of total family income.

The report also finds women accounted for 45 percent of all union members in 2008, the most recent year for which figures are available, up from 34 percent in 1984.

The growing importance of women in the labor movement is likely due to the expansion of female-concentrated sectors such as health care, education, and the service sector combined with the contraction of male-concentrated sectors such as manufacturing.

The pay gap is a lot less for women in unions. But lack of pay equity take a huge chunk out of women’s standards of living as well as their families. Lawmakers finally took action this year and passed the Fair Pay Act. The Senate needs to follow suit. The male-dominated Congress needs to acknowledge that America’s women lack complete economic citizenship.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on August 26, 2010 (boomark / email).