Let’s be clear: Black Ladies’s Equal Pay Day is not only a date on the calendar—it’s a obvious receipt—one marked by exhaustion, resilience, and the deep price of being chronically underpaid.
Black Ladies’s Equal Pay Day on July 10, 2025, symbolizes how far into the 12 months Black girls should work to earn what white, nonâHispanic males earned by the tip of 2024—highlighting a staggering actuality: Black girls who work full-time 12 months spherical make simply 66 cents on the greenback nationally. Over a 40-year profession, that disparity may end up in practically $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 girls 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 charge for Black girls, not simply in Mississippi however nationwide, rose to six.1%—up from 5.1% in March—the best bounce of any demographic group, in response to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
However right here’s the factor: we’ve carried out sufficient explaining why closing the wage hole amongst Black girls and white males is vital, pointing to its direct affect on our households’ financial stability, entry to important healthcare companies, protected housing, childcare and general security. Backside line, the verify is lengthy overdue, and now—notably on the heels of huge Medicaid cuts and SNAP reductions amongst different life shifting setbacks—Black girls should demand it.
On this demand for equal pay, we should push one another to make this a problem within the boardrooms, break rooms, 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, imposing transparency, and defending staff from retaliation once they discuss pay.
In Mississippi, we’re arduous at work in our effort to strengthen our state’s so-called “equal pay” legislation, an outrageous sham and devastating setback for ladies within the state—particularly Black girls—shortchanging them 1000’s of {dollars} annually as a result of gender and racial wage gaps. Underneath the guise of fairness, this legislation rubber stamps employers’ choices to pay girls lower than males for equal work by explicitly permitting them to depend on candidates’ prior wage historical past and on continuity of employment historical past to set pay. It means that it might 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 toddler or look after a sick beloved one. Such a precedent solely serves to additional entrench gender pay disparities throughout Mississippi’s workforce, much like different workforces throughout the South, unfairly penalizing girls for the roles and obligations society so usually expects them to bear.
We should additionally advocate for the Equal Rights Modification to really enshrine gender fairness into the U.S. Structure, giving Black girls stronger instruments to struggle wage discrimination head-on.
And we will’t overlook to name upon the highly effective legislative instruments we’ve, 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, quite than from the date of the discriminatory determination. This legislation extends the time window for staff to hunt redress for pay discrimination, serving to to deal with ongoing pay disparities based mostly on gender, race, or different protected traits.
We should educate staff about their rights beneath federal legislation, in addition to prepare our younger individuals on the way 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 put in writing them. To point out as much as their workplaces. To assist allies comparable to Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Washington Sen. Patty Murray, who’ve lengthy fought for equal pay for Black girls, whereas holding accountable those that haven’t.
This struggle is way from theoretical for me. I grew up in Jackson within the 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 boost the minimal wage for its individuals. This wasn’t neglect. It was survival. Identical to the moms and aunties of at the moment, they labored a number of jobs, barely scraping by, and nonetheless got here up quick. On high of that they had been penalized for asking questions on their pay, or for taking time without work work to soundly have their youngsters. Or they had been 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 had been value.
As Black girls we’ve lengthy been instructed we should “lean in,” work smarter, or simply do extra—as if doing these items will shut the wage hole. However the fact 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 girls have been underpaid, undervalued, and overrepresented in pay inequity, many people barely making ends meet within the 40 lowest-paying jobs in America—roles that usually lack even essentially the most primary protections for us and our households, like medical insurance or paid go away.
Sufficient.
Throughout the South, Black girls—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 struggle wage secrecy, broaden paid go away and Medicaid equitable parental assist, and centering the wants of working households. They, alongside the remainder of us, reject the baldfaced lie that there’s simply “not sufficient within the finances” for Black girls round pay, reminding anybody who’ll hear simply how vital our labor has been to this nation—and simply how a lot the U.S. financial system depends upon us persevering with to assist maintain it up.
This 12 months’s Black Ladies’s Equal Pay Day is not only a passing second—it’s a mandate.
Black girls should demand that the Trump Administration and Congress finish the assault on Black girls’s financial safety by as soon as once more embracing variety, fairness and inclusion applications, not persevering with its slashing of federal jobs, and dealing with intention to strengthen the office rights that profit all Individuals. The verify is lengthy overdue, and we’re not leaving the desk with out it.
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Cassandra Overton Welchlin is the Government Director of the Mississippi Black Ladies’s Roundtable (MS BWR), the place she advocates for the financial safety and civic engagement of Black girls and women. With greater than twenty years of expertise in coverage reform and grassroots organizing, she has been featured in nationwide media and obtained 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.