The TRENDS podcast is a collaboration between the Community Foundation of Boulder County and KGNU. It dives deep into the community’s most pressing issues and explores the changes happening throughout Boulder County through the experiences of community members, especially those often rendered invisible by commercial media, to shed light on community challenges, solutions, and pathways forward for the county and the country.

Listen to the Gender Pay Gap TRENDS podcast episode below:

2020 marks 100 years since the passage of the 19th Amendment granting some women the right to vote in the United States. But a century later, women have not reached full equality in society in many areas, including how much they get paid.

The gender pay gap persists and it’s worse here in Boulder County, but some efforts are underway to close the gap.

Debbie Pope is CEO of the YWCA of Boulder County explains.

“The gender wage gap is exactly what it says. It’s where a male is earning a dollar and a woman is earning 74 cents to every dollar. And a lot of times this is regardless of their experience, or their education.”

The gender pay gap usually refers to the median annual pay of all women who work full time and year-round, compared to the pay of a similar group of men. Despite efforts to close the gap, it persists and it can be economically devastating over the lifetime of a woman.

The Boulder County YWCA has been focusing on how to support women in the workforce by providing affordable childcare and tackling bigger issues like the gender pay gap.

“I think in our country we are still a capitalist society, which means that… money is valued in this country. And it is a reflection of what we value in this country,” says Pope. “So when I just had a conversation with a woman the other day who is a top engineer, she has a great deal of education and experience and was really disheartened to find out that a colleague who had less experienced than her and less education, but was a man was making about twice as much as she was. And so just what that did to her morale.”

There are many factors that contribute to the gender pay gap. These include bias against working mothers, lack of paid maternity leave, the fact that men often dominate higher-paid professions, and direct pay discrimination. This is something that Michelle Frierson has looked at. Frierson is with the CU School of Education and is doing research into the gender pay gap for the YWCA.

Frierson says that women often work in professions that traditionally pay less like education, non-profit work or the service sector. But according to Frierson, even in professions where men and women are doing the same job, women are often paid less.

“Engineering and technology is one of those professions where males are making $55,000 a year, whereas females are only making $48,000. So there’s a big gap there that needs to be looked at,” says Frierson.

Resources:

* American Association of University Women (AAUW) – Find A Branch Nearby

* Start Smart And Work Smart – Salary Negotiation Workshops

But Frierson says there are other major structural issues that need to be addressed as a society that are currently limiting women in the workforce, like lack of maternity or family leave in the U.S..

“I think women definitely take on more duties that are unpaid and generally unrecognized than men do. And maternity leave coverage, just providing that it definitely increases women’s retention in certain professions. We do see a decrease in women who return to their job after they have had children or a decrease in women who decide that it’...