Justice for Migrant Women’s Latina Pay Gap Data Now Includes Part-Time Workers

Across many industries, including marketing and advertising, the gender pay gap remains a looming issue—especially for Latina women. In response, Justice for Migrant Women, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing migrant women’s rights through advocacy, marks every Dec. 8 as Latina Equal Pay Day.

As a way to advocate and spread awareness, Justice for Migrant Women launched the “Viva La Mujer Que Lucha” (“Long Live the Woman Who Fights”) social campaign based on data from a report called “Changemakers: Latinas Working to Close the Pay Gap.” According to the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Latinas are paid, on average, 54 cents for every dollar made by white, non-Hispanic men.

The data looked at median annual reported earnings for Latinas across sectors, ethnicity, sexual orientation and country of origin for full-time, year-round, part-time and part-year workers. Created in partnership with Justice for Migrant Women, Poderistas and The Latinx House, the social campaign will also include a summit in Washington D.C. to continue the conversation with political leaders and activists.

Founder and president of Justice for Migrant Women, Mónica Ramírez, noted that this year, for the first time, data calculations in the report include part-time and full-time workers, making it more inclusive of all work experiences. The report not only highlights the importance of a more inclusive wage gap calculation, but also the need for legislative and societal change around equitable pay for Latinas, Native American, Black and trans women.

Leading the Latina Equal Pay Day campaigns since 2014, Ramírez emphasized the need for a continuous change to be made when collecting data to make sure all the experiences of women are being accounted for. Although the focus remains on the need for legislative change in receiving equitable pay, transparency and inclusivity in data reporting is a crucial element in advocating for change.

“This Pay Day, we are taking into account how many more days and months it takes for a Latina to be paid the equivalent of what a white male non-Hispanic worker was paid in 12 months, and in our case it takes nearly two years,” Ramírez said in a statement. “Since 1996, the data [represented] only people working full-time year round—that meant farm worker women, domestic workers. Part-time workers, their experiences were not being represented. So we pushed very hard to change the way that we calculate and talk about this number.”

Advocating for change

More recently, brands and agencies such as Eleven and the We Are Not a Stereotype campaign featuring women from various advertising agencies have made efforts in addressing the gender pay gap.

However, Ramírez emphasized the need for societal change around the way we address the pay gap issue in media and marketing. How the issue is depicted is vital to the way we understand the experiences of women and the way it impacts Latinas and other marginalized women.

“We know that there are women’s experiences in this country that we do not clearly understand yet,” Ramírez added. “The use of language of when it comes to equal pay is that it is catch-up and that is not accurate—we are actually trying to push the broader community to stop using that language. We do not catch up, we are behind.”

The social campaign “Viva La Mujer Que Lucha” can be seen across Justice for Migrant Women’s social channels under the #LatinaEqualPay tag.