Debbie Wasserman Schultz says pay wage gap in U.S. getting worse

Sunday marked the eighth anniversary of the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which  gives people who experience pay discrimination more time to file a complaint. Although the bill (the first signed into law by Barack Obama) was designed to close the wage gap between males and females in the U.S., Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz says that President Trump is moving in the opposite direction.

“As a mother of two daughters, it’s possible that neither one will reach pay equity with their male counterparts until they both near retirement, according to one study,” the South Florida Democrat said in a statement issued out Sunday night. “Worse, those same inequities will shadow them throughout their retirement due to lower Social Security and retirement plan contributions.”

Wasserman Schultz says the proposal by Trump and the GOP-led Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act will only make it more difficult for women to reduce the wage gap, saying that the “economic impacts and personal hardships this will unleash are going to land disproportionately at the feet of women.”

 Women earn only 79 percent of men’s average hourly wages. That’s the ratio of women’s average hourly pay to men’s average hourly pay.

However, a study published in 2016 by Cornell University economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn said that that comparison is not based on doing similar work, and when these differences are taken into account, the ratio of women’s pay to men’s rises to almost 92 percent from 79 percent.

Wasserman Schultz is a sponsor of the Paycheck Fairness Act, would require employers to prove that any difference in pay is unrelated to gender and prevent employees from being fired for sharing salary information, among other things.

“Women not only need legal protections that enable them to identify and challenge discriminatory pay and employment practices, they need a minimum wage increase, and family-friendly workplaces that legally ensure access to paid family and medical leave, as well as paid sick days,” she says. “Women also need affordable child care, and access to comprehensive reproductive health care. That’s how we erase the wage gap.”