This commentary is by Candice White and Sujata Moorti, both members of the Vermont Women’s Fund council. White is a communications consultant and Moorti is a faculty member at Middlebury College.
In 2019, a Burlington High School soccer team’s advocacy for equal pay gained international attention. After scoring a goal, four members removed their team jerseys to reveal white shirts with the slogan #EqualPay. They received yellow cards.
In the media attention that followed, the Burlington team joined a larger movement seeking pay equity for the U.S. women’s soccer team with their male counterparts. Today, the U.S. women’s soccer team is paid the same as the men’s team, but the gender gap in other arenas remains recalcitrant.
Aug. 26 was Women’s Equality Day, commemorating the ratification in 1920 of the 19th Amendment, which solidified a woman’s right to vote. Women’s Equality Day was established in 1973 at the behest of U.S. Rep. Bella Abzug of New York to recognize the ongoing fight for women’s equality.
How are women in Vermont faring? In 2019, data collected by Change the Story — a collaboration of the Vermont Women’s Fund, Vermont Works for Women, and the Vermont Commission on Women — reported that Vermont women earn, on average, 84% of what white men earn. Vermont women with disabilities suffer a greater wage gap — an additional 13%. And while data on women of color was too low to be statistically reliable, national data suggests they, too, suffer a greater wage gap.
These numbers emerge from persistent structural concerns. Women’s educational attainments may surpass those of men’s, but occupational segregation continues.
Women predominate in fields such as teaching, child care and tipped labor, where wages are notably low. Men still predominate high-paying fields such as financial management, construction and maintenance, computer tech, and the medical and legal fields.
Women still tend to have a second shift and frequently third shift: They assume the responsibility of child care and elder care, whether they work full-time or not. If women leave the workforce entirely to care for young children, they suffer a wage loss and earning-potential plateau while away.
Vermont is making progress, and guarantees certain rights to women in the workplace, including the right of employees to discuss their wages, the right to request flexible working arrangements, that employers provide reasonable accommodations to pregnant women, and the protection of a nursing mother’s ability to express milk at work in a private place other than a bathroom stall.
Despite Vermont’s progress, there is still much work to be done. Since 1778, only 11 of 296 statewide officers have been women. In 2017, only 21% of town selectboard members were women, and only 8% of the state’s highest-grossing companies and two of 15 hospitals were run by women.
A number of Vermont companies and nonprofits are working to train women in nontraditional work, including roofing, trail building, entrepreneurship, aerodynamics and computer coding. Last year, the Vermont Women’s Fund launched the online survey This Way UP — There’s Power in Our Numbers, in an effort to quantify how many women-owned and women-led businesses exist in Vermont, and how much they contribute to Vermont’s economy.
Vermont’s first female congresswoman, Becca Balint, was sworn into office this past January. And this summer, the Legislature passed Act 76, the 2023 Child Care Bill, which will begin to make high-quality, affordable child care available to all Vermont families.
If Vermont women earned the same as Vermont men, the future of Vermont gets much brighter: The poverty rate of single working women with children would fall from 15% to 4%; and most significantly, the poverty rate of children with working mothers would fall 75%, the most significant drop in the nation. And, women’s higher earnings would bring an additional $1.2 billion to Vermont’s economy.
What can we as Vermonters do to continue our progress?
Employers must be transparent with wages, and conduct regular internal reviews to assess the presence of women and people of color in leadership. The Vermont Women’s Fund has helped create a free online tool, Leaders for Equity and Equal Pay Toolkit, that guides businesses with fewer than 400 employees through a gender and racial pay equity review. We can support paid family leave and child care subsidies. We can value all work by honoring it with full-time wages that support basic needs. We can work to increase women’s presence in science, tech, engineering, math, and the trades.
We must remain vigilant to how race, sexuality and gender expression shape women’s economic experiences in the workplace and the home front. And we must continue to collect the data on women in Vermont, so we can accurately see our progress.
In 1920, Vermont was not one of the states that helped ratify the 19th Amendment. One hundred and three years later, Vermont has the opportunity to become a leader in that long-held dream of attaining workplace equity.
It is a confluence of factors — our new child care legislation, our new congresswoman, the hard work of myriad organizations, and the advocacy of Vermonters like the Burlington High School women’s soccer team — that will get Vermont across the finish line.
