Justice

This Bar Has an Amazing Response to the Gender Pay Gap

July 6th 2015

For the first time since I moved to Los Angeles two years ago, I miss living in New York.

The Way Station, a Dr. Who-themed bar in Brooklyn's Prospect Heights neighborhood, will charge female customers just 77 percent of their bar tabs on Tuesday, July 7 (as in 7/7) to highlight the well-known statistic that women earn roughly 77 cents to every man's dollar.

In an email to New York-based publication DNA Info, the bar owners called the pay gap “some shameful shit” and took it upon themselves to promote justice for females, "Let’s level the playing field, even if it is just for one night. Women deserve better. Recognizing this discrepancy is just a start.”

What people are saying about the move

The promo night was met with much positivity on social media, although one Twitter user pointed out that the event drew the attention of Men's Rights activists, some of whom were displeased with the decision to give women a discount on alcoholic beverages:

Earlier this year, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff condemned the gender pay gap and promised to end it at his own company within the next few years.

“I expect to be giving a lot more,” Benioff told The Huffington Post. "My job is to make sure that women are treated 100 percent equally at Salesforce in pay, opportunity and advancement. When I’m done there will be no gap."

Two years ago, Benioff launched a program called Women's Surge upon noticing the low number of female workers at Salesforce. The initiative aims to be more inclusive of women at conferences and in meetings, and Benioff added he's committed to giving females a fair chance to advance professionally.

"Not a single one of my execs hires or promotes without evaluating every woman candidate," he said.

The history of the pay gap

As earlier stated, the average woman takes home around 77 cents of the man's dollar, or $435,049 over the course of a 40 year career. This spring, the Institute for Women's Policy Research published a report that found it will take more than four decades for the pay gap to close.

The IWPR came to these findings after studying gender pay over the past few decades. Thirty-five years ago, women earned 60 cents for every dollar pocketed by men, so while the pay gap has decreased in size since then, the progress is slow enough that "some young women could very well retire before workplace pay equality is achieved," as ATTN: previously put it. The research also shows that some states will see the pay gap disappear much sooner than others. California's gap is expected to be gone by 2042, but Wyoming women will have to wait until 2159 for full equality:

Pay gapWomen's Policy Research - statusofwomendata.org

"Despite progress in many parts of the country, women’s status on employment and earnings either worsened or stalled in nearly half of the states in the last decade,” IWPR President Heidi Hartmann said in a statement after the report went live. “When half the country is not seeing any gains in women’s employment and earnings, it is a concerning prospect for the nation’s economy as a whole.”

As the Daily Beast noted when these findings were published, the pay gap parity varies by state, education level, race, and choice of industry. A white man earns almost double what the average Hispanic woman makes, but Asian women pocket nearly 90 cents to a man's dollar. Women with associates degrees make around 80 percent of what their male counterparts take home, yet highly educated women with graduate degrees make less than 70 percent of what males in similar roles make. Women with undergraduate degrees make 71.4 percent of what their male counterparts earn. As ATTN: previously wrote, women often take out loans to pursue higher education, so the gap could result in these females taking longer to pay off their debt.

For more abut the gender pay gap, here's ATTN:'s video coverage on the issue:

 

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