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Coffee ConAuthor: MS Black Women's Roundtable
Engage in timely, relevant, and important conversations about the issues that matter to Black women and girls in Mississippi, across the south and in the nation. Coffee Con, sponsored by the Mississippi Black Women's Roundtable, offers chats for women from the grasstops to the grassroots on keys policy issues including, affordable and quality healthcare, education & training, legal reform, Equal Pay, child care and civic engagement. We're educating our Sister Circles so they can make a positive difference socially, economically and politically for their families and communities. Language: en Genres: Business, Non-Profit Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Episode 4: Black Women's Equal Pay Day
Episode 4
Friday, 28 August, 2020
This special episode held on Thursday, August. 13, 2020, highlighted National Black Women's Equal Pay Day and featured guests Dr. Wilma Mosley Clopton, filmmaker; Dr. Safiya Omari, City of Jackson, MS Chief of Staff; Mrs. Geraldine Bender, AFT-MS; Dr. Akemi Stout, president of the Jackson Federation of Teachers; Erica Jones, MS Association of Educators president. MS-BWR’s efforts coincide with a national push to encourage conversations about key issues impacting Black women in the United States. Along with MS-BWR’s signature events in Mississippi, various organizations across the country are hosting their own unique events in their respective states to bring awareness to the cause. Mississippi is the only state in the U.S. without an Equal Pay Law. "The pay gap for black women in Mississippi is extreme: 56 cents to the dollar. The typical Black woman must work until August 2020 to be paid what the typical White man was paid at the end of December 2018. Over a 40-year career, the average black woman in Mississippi will lose $849,480 to the wage gap. As a result, Mississippi has the highest poverty rate in the country for women overall (20 percent, compared to 12.4 percent nationally)." Our goal with Black Women’s Equal Pay Day is to educate the public and empower black women with additional information about these challenges and what they mean for our families. We also want to provide insight into some of the ways we can address them, including critical policy changes, more civic engagement, coordinating our efforts and holding our leaders more accountable for improving our state and nation for everyone. MS-BWR address critical issues related to the pay gap in Mississippi and provided some possible solutions in a 2019 report Women Driving Change: A Pathway to a Better Mississippi that was co authored with the National Women’s Law Center. Other key statistics from the report include: For Black women who live at the intersection of race and sex biases, the poverty rate in Mississippi (36.2 percent) is nearly three times the rate for white women (13.3 percent). Mississippi families headed by single mothers face the worst poverty rate in the state and one of the highest poverty rates in the country (49.6 percent, compared to 34 percent nationally.) These barriers are not only holding women back; they are holding back Mississippi families, businesses, and the entire state economy. But it doesn’t have to be that way. For example, if women in Mississippi received equal pay with comparable men, the poverty for working women would be cut by more than half, the poverty rate among children with working mothers would be reduced by one-third, and the Mississippi economy would have added $4.15 billion in wage and salary income (equivalent to 3.9 percent of 2016 GDP) to its economy.
