I am old enough to remember when you could pick up the newspaper want ads and see jobs listed as HELP WANTED – WOMEN and HELP WANTED – MEN. I am old enough to have been fired from a job because the owner wanted a “fresher, more-attractive face” up at the front counter, while the backroom boys made twice what that woman did. I am old enough to remember being passed over for promotion, even though the man who got the job had less experience and education than I did. And even today, with the profession I’m in, we’re paid half as what we should be paid, and is it any accident that we’re mostly women.

Today is Equal Pay Day 2021, and according to the National Committee on Pay Equity, “This date symbolizes how far into the year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year.” Why is it, that over a hundred years after women attained the right to vote, that we’re still struggling over basic issues of fairness, when we make up 50.8 percent of the population?