Equal Pay Day, which fell on April 12th this year, marks how far into the year women have to work to make the equivalent of what men earned the year prior. Over 50 years after the Equal Pay Act was signed, Equal Pay Day reminds us that women need to work almost or over 16 months to earn what men can earn in 12.
In the hierarchy of media coverage the issue of equal pay is discussed first and foremost as an issue of gender, then an issue of race, then an issue of education, location, politics, etc., and finally—once the well of other information has been exasperated and you’ve found your search for information increasingly niche—it’s acknowledged (just barely) as an LGBT+ issue.
It goes without saying that media coverage represents the priorities of our society, and so it’s no shocker that the LGBT+ community was considered as an afterthought at best on Equal Pay Day. Even articles addressing the LGBT+ side of the wage gap showed a disturbing (but somehow unsurprising) lack of information regarding the transgender community, especially trans women, who should undeniably be a part of the gender-centric wage gap discussion.
By now, I’m sure we’re all too familiar with the grating statistic that as of 2014, women in the United States with a full-time job make, on average, 79% of what men are paid. As deplorable as that is, that statistic is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the wage gap because that 79% is reserved for the white women in the workforce.
The second tier of the wage gap media coverage hierarchy acknowledges race. The American Association of University Women’s Spring 2016 report showed that out of a white male’s dollar, Asian American women make 90%, white women make 78%, African American women make 63%, American Indian women make 59%, and Hispanic or Latina women make 54%.
The last tier—ever so slightly—touches upon the transgender community. After observing over 6,000 transgender-identifying participants, The National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) found that respondents had four times the likelihood of having an annual household income of less than $10,000, as compared to the general population.
The survey also revealed that an astounding 90% of respondents reported facing harassment in the workplace, and 26% reported having lost their jobs specifically because they are transgender.
In an article for PRI, Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, a policy advisor for the racial and economic justice initiative of NCTE and trans women, said that transgender people are “at the bottom of the economic ladder,” and that the issue is even more severe for transgender people of color. As of 2015, Freedman-Gurspan’s call to action focuses more on anti-discrimination laws than it does closing the wage gap.
When it comes to pay disparities, we cannot ignore the transmisogyny ingrained in our workplaces, and we cannot overlook the economic barriers transgender-identified people face.Trans women are women and should under no means be left out of pay gap discussion. More extensive and in-depth research regarding this issue should be put into play, and as activists, we should continue this conversation with hopes of advancing the effort toward pay equality in all groups.