Dear Women, Invest In Yourselves

There is a meaningful difference between how much women get paid for a particular job versus how much men do. On average, in the United States, women make somewhere around $.79 on the dollar compared to their male counterparts. It’s a well-trod story, and probably millions of bottles of ink—or whatever the digital equivalent would be—have been spilled in the last few years bringing this pay gap to light. You might be tempted to think, given the rise of fourth-wave feminism as a potent cultural force, that progress was being made towards equal pay for equal work. You would, however, be mistaken: according to the World Economic Forum, we are 132 years, almost a century and a half, away from true parity, and that date has only gotten further away. The pandemic pushed it back a full 30 years, but that’s assuming conditions don’t change. To compare, 132 years ago it was 1890; a lot can happen in that time.