AAPI Women's Equal Pay Day – May 3, 2024

History of AAPI Women's Equal Pay Day

Although many women, including women of color, immigrants, and poor and working-class women, have worked outside the house or been paid for their labor since the country’s founding, the realm of paid employment has traditionally lived in the American psyche as part of men’s public sphere. Women were assumed to exist in the “private” realm, performing unpaid work, until WWII, when record numbers of women entered the workforce.

Recognizing that women had largely replaced men in the war labor industry, the National War Labor Board urged industry leaders to make “adjustments that [would] equalize wage or salary rates paid to females with rates paid to males for comparable quality and quantity of work on the same or similar operation” in 1942.

The National Committee on Pay Parity, a collaboration of women’s and civil rights organizations, labor unions, professional associations, and people seeking to abolish sex and race-based wage discrimination and achieve pay equity, first commemorated the symbolic day in 1996.

In the United States, the battle over equal pay has raged for generations. Several laws have been established to promote the concept of equal pay for men and women.

John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act into law in 1963, and it was heralded as a “great step forward” for women in the workplace. Discrimination based on race, origin, color, religion, or sex was illegal in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Pregnant employees were protected by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, and the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 permitted parents of either gender to take time off. President Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which restored some anti-discrimination safeguards that had been removed in a 2007 Supreme Court judgment and provided corporations with incentives to make their payrolls more equitable.