Closing the Gender Wage Gap

Mar 22, 2023

March 14 marks Equal Pay Day—the day that indicates how far into the year women must work in order to reach pay parity with their male counterparts from the previous year. Although there has been progress on some aspects of women’s rights over the decade, the pay gap between men and women has stubbornly persisted for two decades.

On average, women who are employed full time earn only 84% of what their male peers earn. The pay gap increases for women of color, with Black women earning 67% and Latina and Indigenous women earning 57% of what white, non-Hispanic men earn.

YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar spoke with Michele Kilpatrick, co-director of advocacy and mobilization at the Center for Popular Democracy, about closing the wage gap for Rising Up With Sonali.

The views expressed here and on Rising Up With Sonali do not necessarily reflect the opinion of YES! Media.

Sonali Kolhatkar joined YES! in summer 2021, building on a long and decorated career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. She is also Senior Correspondent with the Independent Media Institute’s Economy for All project where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her forthcoming book is called Talking About Abolition (Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women’s Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. Sonali reflects on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host” in her 2014 TEDx talk of the same name.