PGTI's own Elizabeth Skidmore recently served on a panel discussion about the wide wage gap between men and women in New Hampshire. Check out the article below to learn about the wage equality that's happening in the construction trades and how we can narrow the wage gap for all women.
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By JENNIFER JANIAK
The wage gap between men and women has remained an unresolved social issue for decades, but Granite State women face even greater inequality in the workforce than others across the country.
New Hampshire women earn 77 cents for every dollar New Hampshire men earn, a 5 cent larger gap than the national average, according to the New Hampshire Women’s Initiative.
“It’s clear that there is a growing gap between men and women in the workforce today,” Mark MacKenzie, president of NH AFL-CIO, said Wednesday night at a forum titled “Women, Work, and Wages,” held at Saint Anselm College’s Institute for Politics to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act. “As of the last few years, it’s not had the kind of profile I think it should have. When you talk to the general public about this, it touches everyone.”
Four speakers addressed the wage gap with a variety of statistical findings, mostly focusing on the reason for women’s 23 percent wage loss.
About 14 cents of the loss-per-hour can be attributed to reasons like workforce participation, education attainment, industry and occupation, type of employer, and the preference for flexible work, according to Judy Stadtman of New Hampshire AFL-CIO. For example, Stadtman said that women tend to make up the majority of employees in lower paying sectors, such as elementary and secondary education and certain health care sectors.
“Even the 14 cents that is attributable … to career paths and lifestyle choices, we also need to understand that some of those career paths and lifestyle choices are because of sexism,” Liz Skidmore, one of the speakers, said. “Women grow up and think the only thing they can be is XYZ and … don’t do all the other things.”
However, the remainder of the gap, the other 9 cents, remains unexplained.
Skidmore is a business manager in the Carpenters Local 118 and has worked in carpentry for about 25 years.
Carpentry and construction are among the few job sectors in which women are paid equal to their male peers, she said.
“In union construction, women make exactly the same as men,” Skidmore said. “Starting 35 years ago, when women started getting into construction. Every hour we work, every dollar we get paid, we get paid exactly the same.”
The type of employer chosen by women, another factor Stadtman attributed to the wage gap, also differs from men. More women tend to work for nonprofit organizations and local and state government, while men dominate federal government jobs and the self-employment sector.
In attendance was newly appointed Labor Commissioner James Craig, who asked what can be done to solve the wage gap. While the four speakers offered different solutions, they all agreed that no single, or immediate, solution exists.
“There is no silver bullet to any of this stuff,” Skidmore said. “If there were, we would have solved it already. So what we’ve found is that if you can pull together a group of stake holders from long-term engagement on this … it’s not something that we can solve in one evening, but there absolutely are solutions and when we can bring people together, break down those aisles of expertise, and work toward it, that’s when I think exciting things happen.”
Read the remainder of this article at http://www.nashuatelegraph.com.
