Let’s be clear: Black Ladies’s Equal Pay Day isn’t just a date on the calendar — it’s a obtrusive receipt. One marked by exhaustion, resilience, and the deep value of being chronically underpaid.
Black Ladies’s Equal Pay Day on July 10, 2025 symbolizes how far into the yr Black ladies should work to earn what white, nonâHispanic males earned by the tip of 2024 — highlighting a staggering actuality: Black ladies who work full-time yr spherical make simply 66 cents on the greenback nationally. Over a 40-year profession, that disparity can lead to almost $1 million in misplaced earnings.
Within the immortal phrases of Fannie Lou Hamer, “We’re sick and bored with being sick and drained.”
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In Mississippi, the place I’m from, the hole is even wider: Black ladies right here, together with part-time and seasonal staff, earn simply 53 cents on the greenback. And as if issues couldn’t worsen, as of June 2025, the unemployment fee for Black ladies, not simply in Mississippi however nationwide, rose to six.1% — up from 5.1% in March — the very best soar of any demographic group, in response to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
However right here’s the factor: we’ve completed sufficient explaining why closing the wage hole amongst Black ladies and white males is important, pointing to its direct affect on our households’ financial stability, entry to important healthcare providers, secure housing, childcare and total security. Backside line, the test is lengthy overdue, and now – notably on the heels of huge Medicaid cuts and SNAP reductions amongst different lifeshifting setbacks – Black ladies should demand it.
On this demand for equal pay, we should push one another to make this a difficulty within the boardrooms, breakrooms, and, most of all, on the poll field. Nationally, we should proceed to push for insurance policies just like the Paycheck Equity Act, which might strengthen the Equal Pay Act by banning wage historical past questions, implementing transparency, and defending staff from retaliation once they speak about pay.
In Mississippi, we’re arduous at work in our effort to strengthen our state’s so-called “equal pay” regulation, an outrageous sham and devastating setback for girls within the state — particularly Black ladies — shortchanging them 1000’s of {dollars} every year because of gender and racial wage gaps. Beneath the guise of fairness, this regulation rubber stamps employers’ selections to pay ladies lower than males for equal work by explicitly permitting them to depend on candidates’ prior wage historical past to set pay and based mostly on continuity of employment historical past. It means that it could be acceptable to compensate a girl lower than a person performing the identical work just because she might have taken time away to welcome a baby or take care of a sick cherished one. Such a precedent solely serves to additional entrench gender pay disparities throughout Mississippi’s workforce, just like different workforces throughout the South, unfairly penalizing ladies for the roles and tasks society so usually expects them to bear.
We should additionally advocate for the Equal Rights Modification to truly enshrine gender fairness into the Structure, giving Black ladies stronger instruments to combat wage discrimination head-on.
And we are able to’t overlook to name upon the highly effective legislative instruments we’ve got, together with the Lilly Ledbetter Truthful Pay Act, which ensures that staff can file wage discrimination claims inside 180 days of receiving a discriminatory paycheck, relatively than from the date of the discriminatory determination. This regulation extends the time window for staff to hunt redress for pay discrimination, serving to to handle ongoing pay disparities based mostly on gender, race, or different protected traits.
We should educate staff about their rights beneath federal regulation, in addition to practice our younger individuals on tips on how to negotiate their wages.
And when elected officers fail to behave within the curiosity of our pocketbooks, we should converse up – and loudly. We should urge one another to name these lawmakers about it. To write down them. To point out as much as their workplaces. To assist allies similar to Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Washington Sen. Patty Murray, who’ve lengthy fought for equal pay for Black ladies, whereas holding accountable those that haven’t.
This combat is way from theoretical for me. I grew up in Jackson within the Nineteen Seventies, with my mother and aunt hiding me in utility closets as a toddler whereas they cleaned state company buildings throughout the road from the State Capitol — the identical Capitol the place lawmakers have repeatedly refused to lift the minimal wage for its individuals. This wasn’t neglect. It was survival. Identical to the moms and aunties of at present, they labored a number of jobs, barely scraping by, and nonetheless got here up brief. On high of that they have been penalized for asking questions on their pay, or for taking day off work to securely have their youngsters. Docked pay as a result of they dared to function caregivers to members of the family who wanted them, and handed over for well-deserved promotions, all of the whereas being gaslit into believing they simply “wanted to work more durable” to earn what they have been value.
As Black ladies we’ve got lengthy been instructed we should “lean in,” work smarter, or simply do extra — as if doing this stuff will shut the wage hole. However the reality is, this hole has by no means been about effort. It’s rooted in good old style racial and gender discrimination. Because the very starting, Black ladies have been underpaid, undervalued, and overrepresented, many people barely making ends meet within the 40 lowest-paying jobs in America — roles that usually lack even probably the most primary protections for us and our households, like medical insurance or paid depart.
Sufficient.
Throughout the South, Black ladies — together with Rep. Zakiya Summers, and Sen. Angela Turner Ford, who’re each within the Mississippi Legislature and are vocal advocates for equal pay and office fairness — are championing insurance policies to combat wage secrecy, increase paid depart and medicaid equitable parental assist, centering the wants of working households. They, alongside the remainder of us, reject the boldfaced lie that there’s simply “not sufficient within the finances” for Black ladies round pay, reminding anybody who’ll hear simply how important our labor has been to this nation — and simply how a lot the U.S. economic system will depend on us persevering with to assist maintain it up.
This yr’s Black Ladies’s Equal Pay Day isn’t just a passing second — it’s a mandate.
Black ladies should demand that the Trump Administration and Congress finish the assault on Black ladies’s financial safety by as soon as once more embracing range, fairness and inclusion applications, not persevering with its slash on federal jobs, and dealing with intention to strengthen the office rights that profit all Individuals. The test is lengthy overdue, and we’re not leaving the desk with out it.
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Cassandra Overton Welchlin is the Govt Director of the Mississippi Black Ladies’s Roundtable (MS BWR), the place she advocates for the financial safety and civic engagement of Black ladies and ladies. With greater than twenty years of expertise in coverage reform and grassroots organizing, she has been featured in nationwide media and acquired a number of awards for her management. Cassandra is a licensed social employee, a fellow of the W.Okay. Kellogg Basis, and a proud member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. She lives in Mississippi together with her husband and three youngsters.
