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It’s all about the money today, as members of KU Young Democrats and the Commission on the Status of Women celebrate Equal Pay Day and strive to increase awareness about wage inequities between genders.

While discrimination in the workplace may not be as prominent as it once was, it’s still an issue in the U.S. According to recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women earn about 80 percent of what men earn. Members of Young Democrats and CSW are setting up tables in front of Watson library to remind students of inequality in the workplace.

“I think despite the publicity there are still a lot of people who don’t see how it applies in daily life,” Virginia Burrows, Salt Lake City junior, said.

tThe National Committee on Pay Equity established Equal Pay Day in 1996 to illustrate the gap between men and women’s wages. It is held on a Tuesday in April to symbolize how much longer women have to work to earn the same wage as men do in a week — four days — and how much longer women have to work to make as much as men do in a year — four months.

Michael Shultz, a Lawrence-based attorney who specializes in fair wages, said the issue of fair wages stretched beyond gender and also included different wages based on employee traits other than job-related skill.

Shultz said there were specific determining aspects of what qualified as the same kind of work, and included requiring the same physical or mental capacity and the same time demands.

The American Association of University Women, a research organization specializing in women’s studies, recently completed a study that compared states’ male-to-female salaries and showed that in Kansas, full-time male workers age 16 and older made 25 percent more than female workers, higher than the national average of 20 percent.

Kathy Rose-Mockry, program director for the Emily Taylor Women’s Resource Center, said there were many facets to the fair pay issue, including where much of the stimulus package funds were going.

“It’s important for all our students to be aware of this kind of thing,” Rose-Mockry said.

The first bill President Barack Obama signed into office was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay act, which canceled out a Supreme Court ruling last year that restricted the time employees had to file a wage-complaint suit.

— — Edited by Melissa Johnson

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