A woman working in the U.S. today reckons with a persistent wage gap that can rob her of economic stability. If she is a woman of color, the impact is all the more dire. When looking at both full- and part-time workers, women made only 77 cents on average for every dollar a man made in 2021. Asian American women working full- and part-time made 80 cents on average for every $1 paid to a white man, but the gap is substantially larger for some groups of Asian American women. Black women working full and part time made 64 cents. For Latina/x women it’s 54 cents. For Native women  it’s 51 cents. And when you start disaggregating the data within these groups, the gap often grows. That’s not equity.

That lost income shows up when a woman calculates if she can fill up her gas tank, what she can buy at the grocery store, whether she can comfortably pay her rent and have money left over to put in the bank, and in many cases whether she can afford child care to keep working. The gap grows wider as women move ahead in their careers, hampering the ability to build a nest egg for retirement, and challenging a family’s financial future.

Even with the same background, same education, same skills, same hours, in the same jobs, a gender wage gap persists. It exists in every industry, at all levels. Women deserve to be valued and paid the same as our male equivalents—and given an equal chance at economic security and advancement.