Your Body, Your Gender Pay Gap

Greetings, Meteor readers,

This weekend, while all the cool kids were watching the Oscars, I was baking bread. Not to brag (she says before bragging), but it is the best loaf I’ve made since I started learning how to bake bread a week ago. Maybe those “tradwives” were on to something? Just kidding! Katie Britt is still our collective sleep paralysis demon.

In today’s newsletter, we connect a few dots between the gender pay gap and abortion access. Plus, an update on Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law and, of course, that “missing” princess.

Live from my kitchen,

Shannon Melero

P.S. This Sunday is Selection Sunday for the Women’s March Madness tournament, and if you’re making a bracket this year, there’s a fun challenge for you at the end of this newsletter.

WHAT’S GOING ON

There are no coincidences: Today is Equal Pay Day, the date that marks how far into the next year a woman will have to work to make as much money as a man in a similar position made the previous year. On average, for every dollar a non-Hispanic white man makes, a woman will earn 84 cents. Other factors that lower this number include race, parental status, full-time versus part-time employment, and geography.

And when you go state by state, a pattern emerges. Take, for example, the five states with the largest pay gaps: Utah (73 cents), Louisiana, Alabama, New Hampshire (all at 75 cents), and Idaho (76 cents). What else do all of these states have in common? If you guessed abortion restrictions, then you are correct. Louisiana, Alabama, and Idaho have total bans, while Utah imposes extreme restrictions, and New Hampshire criminalizes abortion after the 24th week of pregnancy.

Coincidence? I think not. But there are a few ways that the rollback of bodily autonomy plays into the larger economic status of women across the country.

It’s partly simple cause and effect. The ability to have children when and how you want feeds financial independence: In the 1970s, when birth control became more accessible, women were able to slowly ascend the ranks of the workforce and get into higher-paying jobs; our paid labor now accounts for a quarter of America’s GDP. Of course, many other factors contribute to the wage gap, too—including the amount of time women spend on unpaid labor, institutional racism, the lack of social safety nets for parents, and the conservative backlash to women entering the workforce. But those factors are often worsened by the same conservative state legislatures passing abortion bans: In other words, the people passing the bans are often the same people refusing to lift the minimum wage for working families who do have babies. Still with us? And when governments are unable to see reproductive rights as a factor in economic stability, they’re willfully ignoring the financial hurdles that millions of women face and facilitating a return to the 1950s ideal of housewives and heteronormative families.

Anne Boleyn once said of her stepdaughter, “She is my death and I am hers.” And that’s how it is with reproductive justice and economic progress—the death of one is the death of the other. As policy analyst and researcher Asha Banerjee wrote in a report for the Economic Policy Institute, “The states banning abortion rights have, over decades, intentionally constructed an economic policy architecture defined by weak labor standards, underfunded and purposefully dysfunctional public services, and high levels of incarceration…we find that, generally, the states enacting abortion bans are the same ones that are economically disempowering workers through other channels.”

AND:

• Parents, students, and advocacy groups who sued the State of Florida over its “Don’t Say Gay” laws have reached a settlement. Students and teachers will be allowed to discuss gender and sexual orientation as long as those subjects are not part of “formal classroom instruction.” So everyone can technically say gay as long as you don’t teach on it.

• Catherine, Princess of Wales—or Kate Middleton, as we peasants call her—has been out of the public eye for weeks, ever since she was admitted to the hospital for an abdominal surgery in January. She recently resurfaced in what was revealed to be an edited family photo. And for reasons that surpass understanding, this phenomenon has birthed a new breed of internet people: Kate Middleton Truthers.

• Abuse of parishioners by Catholic priests is long documented, but one group of abuse survivors says there’s something missing from the Church’s long overdue reckoning: attention for those abused by nuns.

• Last week, a fact-finding mission by the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner concluded that the Iranian government is responsible for the violent death of Mahsa Amini in 2022. The two-year investigation also determined that “security forces used unnecessary and disproportionate force which resulted in the unlawful killing and injuries of protestors. A pattern of extensive injuries to protesters’ eyes caused the blinding of scores of women, men and children, branding them for life.”

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FRIENDLY COMPETITION 🏀

So about that fun challenge I mentioned up top! Like countless others this weekend, I will be cobbling together my limited knowledge of the inner workings of women’s college basketball and making an official NCAA bracket. But wouldn’t it be more fun to do it together? It would!

Here’s how we’ll be doing our Meteor community March Madness. Put your bracket together, and send a PDF of it to [email protected]. As the tournament progresses, I’ll track everyone’s progress until there’s only one bracketologist left standing. That lucky duck will get a fabulous Meteor tote and bragging rights. The tournament begins March 20, so you’ve got until midnight that evening to send me your brackets. May the three-pointers be ever in your favor.

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