coronavirus

How the Pandemic Will Affect Black Women's Equal Pay Day for Years to Come

An illustration of the gender pay gap.

One day in May, Tenia Hargett was preparing for a routine meeting with her manager at a physical therapy clinic. But instead of checking in with her boss, the human resources professional was called into a room with several managers at her workplace.

“They started talking and saying that they were doing budget cuts and decided to eliminate the position I had,” she said.

Hargett said she hopes she won't be unemployed for long, but the Louisville, Kentucky resident has applied for several jobs in the last two months, with no luck. As the unemployment rate remains above 10 percent as of July, millions of Americans like Hargett across a range of industries face financial uncertainty. The economic downfall brought on by the global pandemic, however, may further widen the racial and gendered pay gaps that already put Black women at a disadvantage, NBC News reported.

To mark the pay gap, August 13 is Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, which is the approximate point that, on average, Black women would have made the same amount of money that their white male counterpart would have made by the end of 2019—a whole eight months into the following year. It’s another way of illustrating that Black women in America earn, on average, 62 cents versus every dollar that a white man earns. For women, across all races, that figure is at about 82 cents.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com.

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