Today is Equal Pay Day and around the world, people are posting statistics about how the gender pay gap continues. Here is a useful table from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research that addresses the disparity.
It may even be worse, according to a study released last fall. Automation could make things worse for women, too. No matter what, unequal pay remains a real issue in the United States, and around the world. These graphs make that clear. They also limit our thinking about how to make a change.
Why must the white man be 100%? Why must everyone else be compared to him? That reinforces an endless uphill struggle to achieve his status. Let’s imagine comparing ourselves to the one who is most struggling: Hispanic Women.
Let’s make her 62.1% be the 100% reference point and compare the rest. Suddenly a white man is making 161.03% of her pay. That sure seems like a lot. Perhaps the solution is not how much harder the Hispanic Woman needs to work to measure up, but instead to slash his pay? What other options appear when we rethink how we present these numbers? What relationships, connections, alliances might form? What insights might economists, political scientists, and others discover when the see these numbers in new ways?
The gender pay gap is real, but so are the institutionalized ways of representing it that limit our imagination about how and what could change. Data visualizations form how we think about the information we receive. When they reiterate the status quo, they may make us angry at the unfairness of the world but they don’t help us think about how to change it. If gender equity is a real goal, then every field needs to work on how to help us visualize it so that we can attain it.
