The WAGE Project is working to debunk a popular myth amongst women.
"There are a lot of them who don't believe the wage gap exists anymore,"
says Annie Houle, national director of campus and community initiatives
for The WAGE Project, a non-profit organization established in 2005 to
end discrimination against women in the workplace. "But it does."
And the gap is wider in Wyoming than in any other state in America.
In an effort to empower and educate women, the University of Wyoming
Women's Studies program and Center for Advising and Career Services are
partnering with the Wyoming Women's Foundation (WyWF) to sponsor a
series of statewide workshops in March and April.
The series begins Friday, March 28, on the UW campus and continues
Saturday, March 29, with a statewide video conference. Workshops are
also scheduled for Monday, March 31, at Casper College; Tuesday, April
1, at Laramie County Community College in Cheyenne; and Wednesday, April
2, at Northwest College in Powell. The workshops are free and open to
the public.
The goal of the workshop is to help women gain perspective and
understanding of benchmarks in the salary process and to strengthen
their negotiation skills. To register, go to the Web site at outreach.uwyo.edu/conferences/conflist.aspx.
"If we can reach young women at the beginning of their careers and have
an impact, then we might see a change (in the wage gap,)" says Houle,
who will represent The WAGE Project at the Wyoming workshop series. "For
women my age, this is good stuff for us to learn but it's not going to
impact the number as much as getting to younger women and saying, ‘Look,
there is a wage gap, this is how it happens, this is why it happens and
this is what you can do to eliminate it.'"
According to The WAGE Project, women nationally earn 77 cents to each $1
earned by a man. That number is significantly lower in Wyoming, where
women receive just 55 cents on the dollar, according to a January 2008
study by the Wyoming Department of Employment.
The states nearest Wyoming, according to The WAGE Project data, are West
Virginia (68 cents to a dollar), Louisiana and Utah (69 cents) and
Michigan, Montana and North Dakota (70 cents).
"We're way at the bottom, and that needs to change," says Richelle Keinath, WyWF executive
director.
Marianne Kamp, UW Women's Studies Program director and workshop series
coordinator, believes the outreach effort will help women across the
state to improve their own earnings prospects.
But, she adds, America must resolve structural and societal problems
that are largely responsible for the wage gap to create gender equity.
In Wyoming, for example, jobs that predominantly employ men, such as
mining and construction, tend to pay average to above-average wages,
while jobs that employ women, such as teaching and nursing, tend to pay
below-average wages.
"There are major structural and societal reasons for the wage gap. It's
not that women don't negotiate, but that's part of it," Kamp says. "In
studies that have been done in the past few years, it's been shown that
women enter employment situations more timidly and without the same
assertion as men. And often women seem to want to please and they assume
that the way they're going to get hired is to be pleasing and not
throwing up obstacles like, ‘No, you should pay me more than that.'"
She adds, "That's why these workshops are so important. Any project that
empowers women is one way to help them bring their salaries up."
For more information on the workshop series, call Kamp at (307) 766-5103 or e-mail
mkamp@uwyo.edu, or call Keinath at (307) 721-8300 or e-mail richelle@wycf.org. To
learn more about The WAGE Project, go to the Web site at www.wageproject.org.
