Racism and sexism combine to shortchange working Black women

  Black Women’s Equal Pay Day arrives around this time each year, marking the estimated number of extra months—roughly eight months—that a Black woman working full-time year-round in the United States must work into the current year to have earned what her white male counterpart earned during the prior year. This year, Black women will have to work well into the month of August to catch up to the wages that white men earned in 2018 alone. In concrete terms, this means that Black women experience a pay gap every day—and this gap adds up. In 2017, for example, Black women earned 61 cents for every dollar earned by white men, amounting to $23,653 less in earnings over an entire year. In the span of a 40-year career, this translates into an average lifetime earnings gap of $946,120 between Black women and white men.

Sam Fulwood III: Confronting the racial pay gap

  The Intel Corporation is about to do something so radical and unconventional in the realm of American business that its CEO, Brian Krzanich, admits that he’s “scared to death.” What could possibly so rattle the confidence of the top official of the world’s largest semiconductor chip manufacturer?

  How about Krzanich having to publicly admit to the world that his highly visible and extremely profitable firm pays its African American, Latino, and Native American employees unfairly in comparison to its white and Asian American workers?