Equal Pay Day

Today is Equal Pay Day. In an ideal world, this day would not be necessary. An employee would be paid based on his or her abilities and experience, not based on their race, gender, family background, etc. Unfortunately, we live in a less than ideal world.

For every dollar that a Caucasian male makes, a Caucasian woman earns 83 cents. For the same dollar, an African-American woman earns 66 cents and a woman of Hispanic descent earns 60 cents. I’m not an economist by any stretch of the imagination, but if this gap was done away with, our country would be better off. Think of the earning power of women and the things we buy. Seventeen cents, thirty-four cents and forty cents may not seem like a lot of money, but over the lifetime of a career, that adds up.

Our President talks about equal pay and equal treatment for women in the workplace. Equal treatment in the workplace start with equal pay. But as usual, President Trump talks a good game and means not one word of what he is saying. In revoking the 2014 Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces put into place by President Obama, he is clearly stating women in the work place are lower than their male colleagues simply because they were born female. So much for using his daughter Ivanka as a mouth piece for women.

And that is why we need Equal Pay Day.

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Enter Helen The Invention of Helen Gurley Brown and the Rise of the Modern Single Woman Book Review

Helen Gurley Brown is a publishing legend. Her non-fiction book, Sex and the Single Girl, is one of the literary cornerstones of the second wave of the feminist movement. For decades Helen Gurley Brown was the editor and the face of Cosmopolitan magazine.

Enter Helen: The Invention of Helen Gurley Brown and the Rise of the Modern Single Woman, By Brooke Hauser, is the story of how Helen Gurley Brown started off life as the daughter of poor as dirt family in Arkansas and ended her life as one of the most influential women of the 20th century. Together, with her husband, David Brown, they helped to pave the way for future generations of women to move beyond the traditional roles of marriage and motherhood.

While this book was slow at certain points, I very much appreciated not only the detail that Ms. Hauser put in the book, but also the unconventional structure of the narrative. While it seems that on the surface that Helen Gurley Brown was pushing the traditional agenda for women, she was actually subtlety changing the world.

I recommend it.