In the United States, if men earn one dollar, women's income will be less, sometimes half that of men. Why have we not closed the gap? BY HELENA MARÍA VIRAMONTES
My mother insists on a steel-like professional ethics. Working in the fields and experiencing the birth of 11 children-this is the news in our local newspaper in East Los Angeles-how could she not do this? She grew up in Los Angeles, in the 1920s and 1930s. Anti-Mexico violent deportation operations, large-scale deportation operations drove immigrants and citizens out. Although she believes in marriage, she is very dissatisfied with her financial dependence on my father. Therefore, she is determined not to let her six daughters, which are us girls, fall into the same predicament. These capricious attacks always reminded her of how "dispensable" we are as Latinos. She strives to create a tribe of women who are not afraid of hard work, a loving commune of our own.
At home, don't expect others to give alms. In addition to the shelter and food provided by our American-born parents, we work to meet various needs; driven by a firm determination to pursue a better future, we even have jobs while in school. It was not until later that I realized that our labor is determined by our gender, by the brown body of the working class, whether it is in the heavy housework or the hard work of picking grapes in the summer in California. Our labor is measured in units of sweat and muscles, internal organs, and naked eyes. This is what my mother understood as honest labor.
My years in university have exposed me to another way of working. This way of working is embodied in a sacred privilege. Toni Morrison once referred to this privilege as being related to my own thoughts. Companion. It was then that I began to understand how certain jobs — and certain workers — were considered inferior to other jobs. I was lucky enough to go to a university established by Roman Catholic nuns,They are feminists, active teachers and staunch humanitarians. Many of them chose to abandon their vows and form a non-profit, non-professional group instead of following the strict rules of the Patriarchal Archbishop of Los Angeles. Their fearless behavior deepened my understanding of resistance to oppression and love.
I got a college diploma and was the first woman in our family to get a college diploma. I returned to my hometown and started looking for an honest job worthy of fair pay. After months of frustrating interview failures-I am not proficient in the work done by sisters such as clerks, cashiers, or nurses-it is impossible for me to find a bottling line at the Pabst brewery. Before working, I enrolled in a creative writing class at California State University, Los Angeles
. Whenever I opened the spiral notebook at the table to jot down an assignment or write a poem, my mother would feel uneasy. I was unemployed, and she was very upset to see me sitting in a daze. She would ask me to water the peach trees, or to clean the porch, or to wash the dinner dishes in the sink. These housework must have to wait at least another half an hour. It wasn't until one of my short stories won the first prize in a college literary competition and won a huge bonus of $25 that the labor model changed. When my mother came to me for another housework, I handed her the check. "Where did you get it?" she asked, because in 1976, the figure was equivalent to $250. "I bought it for writing," I replied. She stuffed the check into her apron pocket, then left the room and brought me back a cup of coffee.
That check convinced my mother that my talent would allow me to make a living and take care of myself, and her self-confidence made me aspire to pursue an unimaginable writing career. In turn, my sisters gave me something else: a sense of self-worth, because it is my job to tell their stories. All I have to do is to get over the high walls of our country—the persistent high walls with prejudice, literally and metaphorically high walls, to prevent me from fully realizing my value. I realized that it is impossible for me not to write.
I am writing this article because I want everyone to think about where we put our value and how systematic gender and racial discrimination promote the devaluation of people and their labor. The pay gap data proves this point.Even if analysts control for known factors affecting pay, such as race, industry, education, and work experience, they cannot explain why the gender pay gap exceeds one-third. But apart from discrimination, is there any way to explain the unexplainable part of the gender income gap?
The history of the United States is rooted in colonization, the genocide of native people, and slavery. These systems have always maintained the subordinate status of women (here I Including cis, trans, gender-flud-all women). If we do not face up to the remnants of violent discrimination in history, we will never be able to fully understand the pay gap and the persistence of this shameful inequality.
Here are some statistics and facts:
There are significant differences in gender wage gaps in different states, and for most women of color, the gap is even greater. This is so widespread, in fact, October 21st is the equal pay day for Latin Americans, because they need this long—a whole year plus 10 months and 1 second—to earn non-Latinos The annual income of white men. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced women to lose more jobs than men; in the long run, as women return to the workforce, this may exacerbate the wage gap.
Asian women have the largest pay gap. In Delaware , many Asian working women are Indians and Chinese, and their income exceeds or is equal to that of non-Hispanic white men.
Nationally, white women have the smallest pay gap compared with other female groups—the difference between the highest-income Vermont and the lowest-income Utah state is only 18 cents.
White Hispanic women are twice as likely to work in low-income service jobs as non-Latino white women. In the past 30 years, their income gap with non-Hispanic white men has narrowed by 3 cents.
A Native American woman with a bachelor's degree earns roughly the same income as a non-Hispanic white man with a high school diploma. Three-fifths of women are the breadwinner of the family.
Black women with a college degree earn 35% less than non-Hispanic white men, including men without a college degree or a high school degree.
Women account for nearly half of the American labor force and have more college degrees than men, but the income gap for women is not expected to narrow in the next few years. For some women of color, marches for equal pay take longer than others. If current trends continue, Asian women are likely to achieve equality first, while black women and Latino women will not achieve equality in this century.
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Although women’s labor is vital in the private sphere of the family and the public sphere of the community, according to anti-racist feminist activist Angela Davis, During the Industrial Revolution, women's labor became devalued because it was unable to generate satisfactory profits. Treating women's work as inferior makes women's work cheap and leads to a systematic erosion of respect for women, thus justifying pay inequality based on gender, race, or both.
Law and Sociology Professor Dorothy Roberts explained how to divide female housework into spiritual housework and humble housework, thus forming a racialized female labor hierarchy. Managing the family and instructing children in moral education is a spiritual work that later became the responsibility of privileged white women. Heavy and tedious housework is not taken seriously because it is believed to have low requirements for skills and intelligence, which is related to immigrants and women of color. To this day, statistics show that "humble" workers are still disproportionately women of color.
As a Mexican writer, I need to understand how discriminatory practices work, so that I can eliminate them word by word and remove the stereotypes about us. This is an act of love between my mother and me; when accepting her cup of coffee, I promised from the bottom of my heart that we would let our struggles be fully revealed.
Latinos often work in the shadow of the community, and they accept low-wage and most undesirable jobs. Most people have no medical insurance, no sick leave or vacation, and of course no childcare. (Why women suffer more economic losses during the pandemic)
The Ministry of National Farm Workers believes that female farm workers are "arguably the most exploited workers in this country, even more vulnerable than male farm workers." Therefore, in my first place In a novel "Under the Feet of Jesus", I described the life of a Latino farm worker. My countrymen were everywhere-I never forgot their plight, because I was one of them.
Considering their varying degrees of citizenship-a large part of which is undocumented-Latino farm workers who have been abused and feared losing their jobs have little recourse. They endured the torture of picking, planting, pruning, high temperature stress and pesticides, as well as sexual assault and sexual harassment called "epidemic" by the co-founder of the United Farm Workers Organization, Dolores Huerta.
Latin Americans working on farms are establishing collective organizations like the "National Farmers Union", which advocates immigration reform and human rights. However, only if "Me too, the life of black people is also life" and the LGBTQ movement succeeds in promoting racial and gender equality, their struggle for wage equality will be victorious. First of all, we want to remind everyone that these workers are not optional, but an important part of our daily lives. The coffee we drank in the morning and the vegetables we ate for dinner were probably harvested by Latino farmers. They help feed a country and the world. Even during the pandemic
When my children were young, I hung up a poster at home that said: "Women can hold up half the sky." This is a poetic picture, intended to Inspire people, but sometimes I reflect on the weight of the world and how exhausting this difficult task is for the Latin working class like my mother, my sisters, and everyone in my community. This image implies a necessary resistance to the rules of gravity, a war in which we are fighting against inadequate salaries all the time, and these salaries try to make us seem inhuman to some extent.
Latin Americans working on farms have access to citizenship, and like all women, they have fair remuneration and recognition. Are we not working hard enough?
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