May 3 marks Equal Pay Day for Women in Asia and the Pacific Island, which shows how far AAPI women must work during the year to catch up with what white men earned the previous year.
Asian-American and Pacific Islander women working full-time in the US are typically paid $0.95 for every dollar paid to white men, according to National Women’s Law Center. But Jasmine Tucker, director of research at the NWLC, says CNBC Make It that’s the figure $0.95 does not reflect the real wage gap due to a “massive shift in low-paying jobs” in 2020, the most recent year for which data is available.
The NWLC calculated the pay gap between AAPI women and white men, regardless of how many hours they worked, to more accurately capture the failures and job losses of AAPI women in part-time roles. time or seasonality faced during the Covid-19 pandemic and found that AAPI women only earned an average of 75 cents for every dollar paid to a white man in 2020.
AAPI women make up a high proportion of low-wage and frontline jobs, accounting for about 3.8% of the frontline workforce despite making up only 2.9% of the overall workforce, with many women employed in the workforce. pay less than their white male counterparts. in the same profession, according to National Forum of Asian Pacific American Women.
In addition to this ongoing wage disparity, AAPI women are continuing to face an increase in racial violence and harassment as a result of the racist and xenophobic slurs surrounding the Covid-19 virus. .
The racism and harassment that AAPI women are threatened with in the workplace, as with other women of color, “distracts them from achieving equal pay and doesn’t feel safe or supported. , reaching their full potential at work,” noted Tucker.
It is important to note that the pay gap very different among women from different AAPI communities.
According to the NWLC, full-time, year-round AAPI women can lose $120,000 over a 40-year career, but women from different AAPI communities experience a much higher loss of pay over time: On average, Burmese women lost $1.2 million, Nepalese women lost more than $1.1 million, and Hmong and Cambodian women lost nearly $1 million to the wage gap in their lifetime.
“Some AAPI women come from countries where women do not have access to higher education, which prevents them from accessing better-paying work or they can only afford to live in certain regions in the United States with limited access to higher-paying work,” Tucker explained. As a result, she adds, many AAPI women are pushed into lower-paying jobs in the retail, restaurant and personal care industries – sectors hardest hit by the pandemic. job.
According to a NAPAWF report, at its peak, the unemployment rate among Asian women aged 20 and over reached 16.4% in May 2020. Latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that number has dropped to 2.6%.
Still, some AAPI women are still experiencing a drop in income: A recent NWLC poll of AAPI women who lost their jobs during the pandemic found that less than half (47%) of women found a job. new.
The ongoing pandemic threatens not only to widen the pay gap faced by AAPI women, but also to affect the financial well-being of their families.
Yvonne Hsu, director of policy and government official at NAPAWF, said in a declare that there are millions of Asian-American mothers living in multigenerational households who are shouldering the burden of caring not only for their children, but also for aging parents and family members.
She continued: “More often than not, they are also breadwinners in the family … and to make up for lost wages, AANHPI women have no choice but to work longer hours and many jobs that often don’t allow paid medical or family care leave are women who will never ‘catch up’ with their white men.”
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