The data around the economic inequality faced by women and girls in California kept popping up year after year — and that was the problem.
“I knew that the wage gap and the many consequences and ripple effects had to be at the core of my tenure because I felt that so strongly,” says Nicole Haggard, director of the Center for the Advancement of Women at Mount Saint Mary’s University. The university, in Los Angeles, has commissioned its annual Report on the Status of Women and Girls in California for the past 13 years and this year’s report focuses on “The Cost of Being a Woman: Advancing Solutions for Economic Equality,” released earlier this month. At last year’s event to discuss the 2023 report, the university’s professor noted that this same data was repeating itself and she found it to be unacceptable; Haggard was in agreement, so when she was asked to lead the center last year, she knew this would be her focus.
“When we were talking to our community partners, what I realized was that we needed to really analyze the wage gap and also look at it from a bunch of different angles because I feel like that 11-cent difference (according to this year’s report, California women earn $.89 for every $1 earned by men) is hard to wrap our minds around; but it also became clear that there are so many obvious costs, like the pay gap, but there’s also a lot of hidden costs, like health care, beauty standards, care work—all these things that add up,” she says. “Ultimately, they pay us less, but everything costs us more, so how can women and girls in California thrive when the cost of being a woman is so high?”
In addition to her role at the center, Haggard also has a doctorate in American studies with an emphasis on women’s studies and critical race theory; she’s a faculty member in Mount Saint Mary’s film, media, and social justice program; and co-founder of the Center for Intersectional Media and Entertainment. She took some time to talk about this year’s report and how agencies and organizations have demonstrated an ability to take the data and turn it into policy and community organizing work that improves conditions for California’s women and girls. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: The university’s annual Report on the Status of Women and Girls in California was released earlier this month, compiling research on various issues and trends that affect women and girls in the state. Early in the report, the gender pay gap is addressed, noting that the gap has closed by 5 percentage points in California over the last decade. How did California manage to do this?
A: It’s really important to note that California and Vermont are the two states that have the lowest wage gap, so even if it sounds horrible in California, imagine what’s happening for women across the country, too. I always want to keep that in mind because, oftentimes, we hold California up like, ‘Yay! California is doing all of this great stuff and a lot of the other states can learn from us!,’ but also keep in mind how bad it must be for women out there.
One of our really close partners is the California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls. One law that we ed with them was a bill around pay transparency, and this has been a gamechanger for California. In the past, a job would be posted, but it would say “salary commensurate with experience,” or whatever that line was that we all grew up reading. Women would come in and, for a variety of reasons, would say, “I want this much money for this job.” Let’s pretend it’s $150,000. Then, a dude who’s more familiar with the industry, has experience, or his dad has worked in this company, would say, “I want $300,000.” Even though the woman may be a better candidate and more qualified, just the simple fact that somebody asked for more money, triggers our brain to believe that they are more valuable. This bill, SB 1162, now requires companies to share the salary ranges that they’re going to offer for these positions, and that has been a gamechanger for women to close the gap.
Q: Despite this slight close in the gap—in addition to the Equal Pay Act of 1963, making it illegal for employers to pay women less money for performing the same jobs and tasks as their male colleagues; Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sex (and used in wage discrimination cases); the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, reversing a Supreme Court decision that upheld a short statute of limitations for wage discrimination claims; and more recently, the Paycheck Fairness Act, serving as an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, to further address wage discrimination on the basis of sex—this pay disparity in California has remained the same for Latina women and actually increased for Black women; what happened? And what needs to happen to achieve parity?
A: You noted the wage gap closed by 5 percentage points over the past decade, but then only 1 percentage point since 2018. That would be the pandemic. We know that the pandemic especially hit women who aren’t White the hardest. It was really important for me to break that down by race and ethnicity and see what does that actually mean and look like? What we found was that, over a 40-year career, that would look like White and Asian women losing out on more than $700,000; for Black women, it’s $1.6 million; and for Latinas, it’s $2.1 million that they’re missing out on. It also means that a Latina would have to work 50 years more than a White man to make the same amount of money. So, if a White dude is retiring at 65, a Latina is working until she’s 110. Again, unacceptable.
To your point, the reason why the wage gap got better was because things got better for White and Asian women. Latinas, it stayed about the same, and for Black women it’s gotten worse (it still isn’t as bad as Latinas, but they didn’t make any progress, they got worse). This is a big problem. When we looked at what’s happening within women, specifically, a lot of things pop up that we know. Education is the number one indicator of your personal wages increasing; how many hours they work, if they’re working full time or part time; what occupation sector they’re in. So, we have a whole section in the report about occupational clusters and the wage gap differences in those clusters. Then, you can also see that Latinas are the majority of the cluster where the pay gap is the biggest. Ultimately, it’s just hiring discrimination, at the end of the day. It’s just plain old bias, so that’s really shutting out Black and Latina women from these higher earning opportunities. That’s between women.
When we look at men versus women, we used to be able to point to education, but now the girls are outperforming the boys. We used to be able to point to the different occupational sectors, but Claudia Goldin, who just won the Nobel Prize for her work on the pay gap and she’s an economist at Harvard, found that there have been many different reasons why the pay gap has changed and it’s very up and down. She says that, until we have couple equity, we’ll never have pay equity. What she’s really referring to is care work in the home. The piece of that that people are missing out on is the fact that also means that our workplace culture needs to change. We have more women in the workforce now than we ever have before. Sixty-five percent of all new moms are in the labor force and working dads is something we need to normalize. This idea that there are lots of caretakers in our workforce, whether that means that you are taking care of an aging parent or your children or whoever, caretaking is a thing that makes our culture run, so our workforce needs to become more adaptable. For Latinas, in particular, we find that they work multiple jobs to make up for these lower wages, which also means longer hours away from their families. Women are not a monolith and there are different things happening for different folks, but it’s really great to dig in and find where that disparity is happening for me, and where can I make the changes in the path that I’ve chosen?
Q: In the report’s chapter on financial health, women across the country are only to save $3,146 dollars each year, compared to $7,007 for men. Then, the cost of beauty and maintaining their appearance costs an average of $3,756 each year, in addition to California women paying an average of $2,381 more than men for the same goods and services. Can you talk about the Pink Tax? What it is and how it factors into the financial health of women and girls in the state?
A: I think the cost of beauty is really fascinating because I’m a media studies professor, so I know how much our culture tries to convince us that what we look like is the most valuable thing . Even though we know that’s not true, and I’m worth so much more than that, it’s so hard not to play into that in our culture. So, women spend an average of 55 minutes a day on their physical appearance, which would add up to a two-week vacation, so there’s the time aspect of it. Then, there’s the literal money aspect of it. That statistic that you’re quoting, that actually came from the California government. They discovered this and because of that, they ed the law that was the Pink Tax law, to stop companies from doing this predatory practice [prohibiting business from charging different prices for the same products based on the gender the products are marketed to]. To your point about savings, the piece of that that was really fascinating to me was when we get to debt, what men will use credit cards for versus women. Men are going into debt to buy luxury items and things they really want, and to splurge on themselves and their loved ones, whereas women are using debt in order to make up for the wage gap. They are using it pay their electric bills, or going into debt to buy groceries.
Q: There’s a recent story from a young woman who was applying for a job as a vice president in human resources at a tech company. During the interview process, which was conducted via video, she was eliminated from moving on to the next round. When she asked about why she didn’t make it farther along in the process, the recruiter told her that the company was concerned that she hadn’t put enough effort into her appearance despite the fact that she’d worn a blazer and collared shirt, gold earrings, and had her hair and nails done. The only thing she hadn’t done was wear makeup. What’s your response to the argument that women and girls should simply opt out of beauty regimens that result in additional costs?
A: This really brings back the culture shift. How much are we participating in our own oppression, how much is our society oppressing us? It’s definitely a both/and, but the professional beauty standards are a part of this and are a real thing for many women. I’m lucky enough to work in a place where there are a lot of women and we give each other a lot more leniency with that kind of stuff, but there are women who are really facing it, so it’s not a one-size-fits-all answer. At the end of the day, we need to be aware of this data. And, not just women; all of us need to be aware of this data, so we understand, ‘You are paying us less and everything costs us more.’ It’s not just a financial cost, it’s also a time suck. I don’t have an hour every day to do that. If I wasn’t spending an hour doing this, guess what? I could be writing up that contract.
There are things that can be great about feminine beauty standards and what those allow us to do, and some of us really lean into that; the predatory practice of charging us more for the exact same product, or the cultural expectation that we are not as valuable if we don’t participate in those standards, that’s where I have a problem. People should be able to choose what they want to do.
Q: What are some other findings in the report that factor into this “cost of being a woman” that stood out to you?
A: The data on girls really stood out to me, especially because I’m a parent. What we found was that, in households that pay kids for chores, teenage girls report receiving less money than teenage boys do. So, at a very young age, we are priming girls to believe that their labor is worth less and that their time is worth less. Girls are noticing, but boys are noticing, too. How are we, even in our own households, participating in that in ways we may not even realize?
We open fewer 529 tuition savings s for girls than we do for boys, too. That was really big for me. As a parent, I’m always deciding on what activities to sign my kids up for. With the particular mental health stuff girls are dealing with, we found that if you choose activities that are girl-led, hands on, and have some sort of focus on community service — something around, ‘How do I be active in my community and make the world a better place">Shero’s Rise, these are the types of programs that I would look for to be enrolling my girls in so that they can be involved in programs that are going against the narrative that our culture is telling them, that their money and their time are not valuable.
Q: In your letter in the report, you mention the university’s Center for the Advancement of Women’s new partnership with the California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls. What are the plans for this partnership?
A: Some things that you will be seeing coming from us are think tank convenings around these issues, you’ll see more research and data that’s really targeted on intersectional gender equity issues, and just being the bridge between the data and the government. We’re both all about how do we turn data and research into actionable items? We really wanted to be able to dig deeper because the report is a really great, big overview, but what about this specific thing that there’s public policy coming up on? How can we look into that? How can we bring the best minds into the room and use our collective partnerships and resources to do that, so that we can really escalate the advancement of women and girls in our state? Because we know that if girls fail, our whole economy fails.
It’s interesting when people are like, “It’s a woman’s issue.” No, it’s a California issue. It’s an everybody issue. With the population numbers, there’s one page in the report that talks about the 18 and up population versus the 5 to 17 population. For the 18 and up population, White women and Latinas are pretty neck-and-neck, they’re like 36 percent; but the 5 to 17 population, it pops up to 53 percent Latinas and White women go way down. So, the next generation of California women is Latina. If we don’t figure out what is going on for Latinas and solve this, our economy is going to collapse. To me, that’s why it’s so imperative to talk about this as in this isn’t a women’s issue, it’s a California issue. It’s so important for us to have an intersectional lens and say, that’s where race comes into play, here’s how age comes into play, here’s how body size comes into play. It’s so great for us to have this partnership with the commission because now we can expand our reach to all of the different folks and the policymakers who are making these decisions and enacting them.
Then, what happens is that our communities don’t really know about them. For example, we have been reporting on the maternal mortality crisis for years now, especially how it’s impacting Black women in California. Because of our data being able to be put in the hands of the right people, California ed the Momnibus Act [signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021], which is a comprehensive way to attack the maternal mortality crisis. One thing that came out of that is that now Medi-Cal will cover doulas in the hospital, but we need more women of color to be doulas, to serve the population. So, we partnered with an organization called Birthworkers of Color Collective and that is literally what they’re doing, is training more women to be doulas. It also transforms those women’s lives because a lot of these women were just doing it for free. It was like a community service they were doing for each other, like ‘Yes, girl, I’ll come to the hospital with you,’ that kind of energy. Well, now it’s a legit career path that they’re able to do. That’s just an example of a way in which our data helps push policy through, and then out comes the other end of the wheel, once the policy is pushed through, then we’re there to help the folks who are doing something with the policy.
