If you lost 21 cents from your pocket — say, to the couch, or it fell out on the subway — you might not fight too hard to get it back in your grasp. But what if you lost nearly $500,000? Couch cushions would fly. The subway emergency brake would be pulled.
That is how much women lose over the course of their careers to the gender pay gap. On average, a woman makes 79 cents to a man’s dollar. National Equal Pay Day represents how far into the current year many women must work in order to close that gap in their previous year’s earnings. This year, that date falls on April 12.
The numbers are even lower — and the pay gap wider — for non-white women.
At this rate, we’ll achieve equal pay in 2059 — 43 years from now. A woman starting her first day of work today is already behind.
That’s a whole generation of women being cheated by the pay gap.
At Gap Inc., Every Day is #EqualPayDay.
The company pays women and men on average — globally, dollar for dollar — equal pay for equal work. In 2014, the company, for the first time, released data confirming equal pay for equal work across the globe. It was reconfirmed for the third consecutive year in 2016.
Equality is woven into the fabric of the Gap Inc. company culture and business practices. The Gap was founded in 1969 as an equal investment between a woman and a man — Doris Fisher and her husband, Don, who ran the business as equal partners. Today, women make up approximately 74 percent of the company's workforce. The majority of its five brands’ customers are female.
Learn more about
the U.S. minimum wage and how it relates to women's equality.
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