“Equal Pay Day is not just about a single check, it’s about how much money Black women lose out on,” said Nikki Tucker, head of social at LeanIn.Org, who hosted the talk. “And Black women lose out on around $1 million in income over the course of their lifetime.”More specifically, that’s more than $964,000, according to Lean In, which cited stats from the National Women’s Law Center. And by contrast, white women are losing out on $555,000 over their lifetimes compared to white men.
Katrina Jones, vice president of people and operations at Lean In, experienced being underpaid relative to someone her junior before joining her current role. And for Erika Bennett, chief marketing officer at Essence, who said she “negotiated the hell out of” a role she was stepping into before her current one, HR then told her never to tell anyone what she was making, despite that being a protected activity under the U.S.
One link in the corporate chain that’s fueling these facts, according to Jones, is that Black women aren’t being promoted. Seconding that, Malcolm-Thornton said, “Like Erika [Bennett], I would get that VP or SVP role but not the top C-level job because they always felt more comfortable with a white man in that seat, in my experience.”
Not me having flashbacks of being on the worst date ever- picking my jaw up off the floor after a man tried to explain how the wage gap doesn’t exist