The Real Cost of the Pay Gap for Women with Deborah Vagins

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As women, we need to recognize that equal pay isn’t just about fairness. It’s about financial freedom.This week on Women & Money: The Shit We Don’t Talk About, we’re diving into one of the most important financial conversations women need to understand.The gender pay gap is still real, and it impacts everything from retirement savings to generational wealth.

Our guest, Deborah Vagins, National Campaign Director & Director of Equal Pay Today, has spent decades fighting for economic justice. She is the National Campaign Director at Equal Rights Advocates and Director of the Equal Pay Today Coalition, a national coalition working to close wage gaps and advance workplace protections.

Deborah shares what the pay gap actually means for women’s long term financial security, why equal pay days exist, and the real policies being pushed right now to close the gap.

We also talk about the hidden ways pay inequality affects retirement, healthcare, and generational wealth.

If you’ve ever wondered why this issue still matters, this episode will open your eyes.

Deborah reminds us that financial freedom is about more than money. It’s about dignity, safety, and having the power to make choices for yourself and your family.

If this conversation sparked something for you, take the next step and join us for next week’s Money Talks “Beyond Equal Pay: Building Wealth Anyway”. Click here to register for FREE and bring your questions!  

Follow & connect with Deborah Vagins:

• Equal Rights Advocates 
• Equal Pay Today 

ERA:
https://www.instagram.com/equalrightsadv/
https://www.tiktok.com/@equalrightsadvocates
https://www.linkedin.com/company/equal-rights-advocates/
https://www.facebook.com/EqualRightsAdvocates
https://www.youtube.com/user/equalrightsadvocates

Equal Pay Today:
https://www.instagram.com/equalpay2dayorg
https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/equal-pay-today/
https://www.facebook.com/EqualPayToday/
https://x.com/EqualPay2dayOrg

This episode is supported by Marguerita Cheng, CFP®, RICP®, CDFA®, CEO of Blue Ocean Global Wealth. Marguerita works with women navigating divorce to bring clarity, confidence, and control back into their financial lives. At Blue Ocean Global Wealth, the focus is on helping women understand their options, make informed decisions, and feel empowered about their financial future, especially during moments that feel uncertain or overwhelming. If you’re going through divorce and want support that’s clear, grounded, and centered on your long term wellbeing, you can learn more and connect with Marguerita at www.blueoceanglobalwealth.com and follow her on

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Transcript

Barb: [00:00:00] Maggie, one of the things that I teach when I work with financial professionals is the whole equal payday and what it is and what the demarcation of equal payday means. It's typically in March, and we've learned on this episode that this year it's March 26th, which is probably the latest we've ever seen equal payday.

Barb: And the reason I feel it's so important for financial professionals is because. This shows the inequities of pay. It's the date in which women have to work into the year that they're paid equal to men and what they've earned previously. And why that's so important for financial professionals to know is that there is inequities in pay.

Barb: This is just one piece. Which is I think 82 or 83 cents on the dollar right now. And when you're planning for women and women are going to financial professionals, you want those financial professionals to know this is huge. This is still an [00:01:00] inequitable pay, why this is happening. And that women still will outlast their male spouses if they even do get married, and they will age solo.

Barb: So the impact of the lack of equal pay. Compounds into the lack of dollars going to Social Security and to any matches and all the other benefits that it impacts. And it's huge. It's huge. So this is such an important topic. So this topic, along with a lot of other things we've learned from Deb, was so insightful in this episode that I think it's one of the best episodes we've had.

Maggie: Not just insightful, but like also inspirational and not in just a rah rah way, but the work that she's been doing. The good fight that's, you know, in legislation in these different, you know, non-for-profit organizations. It's amazing and it all kind of stemmed from seeing her mom and the inequities that her mom faced.

Maggie: And it's hard because this is not always the headlines these days. There's a lot of other things [00:02:00] taking over, but there are still people doing the grunt work, you know, boots on the ground, getting this done for all of us. And you know, there's always the time where it's like you wish it was the conversation you didn't need to have because everything was equal and it was all perfect.

Maggie: But it's not, you know, and it's something that we want to keep talking about and get a bigger microphone and, and keep shouting from the rooftops until. It does become a norm, you know, and, and our kids don't have to think about, am I getting equal pay for equal work in this job? But until that day comes we'll keep fighting.

Maggie: And it's amazing to hear Deb's timeline of, of the work that she's done, you know, over 30, 40 years, which has just been amazing. 

Barb: Yeah. And she's given us great tools and resources that we're gonna have in the show notes on how we can help just by making phone calls learning about what the policies are coming forth, and how we can ask our legislatures to really take a look and pass them.

Maggie: And I know you've been sending me tiktoks the past 48 [00:03:00] hours. 'cause what else is new? And all of 'em are just about being loud, you

Maggie: know? And those women who made a change, they were loud, you know, it might almost hit the point of annoying, 

Barb: They were annoying, they were bossy, they were loud. They wanted more. They wanted better for us, and we have to keep being loud. We can't sink back into, it's not my problem, it's not my issue, it's all of us that we need to link arms and really step forward on this one.

Maggie: Or I don't know what to do about it. Great. Listen to the full episode there's a couple takeaways of actions you can take. So find your voice, whatever that sounds like for you. You know, whether it's emails, phone calls, whatever it is. Let's get loud.

Barb: let's get loud.

Maggie: Let's get started. 

Gloria Steinem once said, we will never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth. Barbara Provost and Maggie Nielsen are the team at purse strings that will help you [00:04:00] navigate the ins and outs of financial independence so that you can be financially fearless. This is women in money, the shit we don't talk about.

Maggie: Welcome to Women and Money, the shit we don't talk about. I am ecstatic to get into this episode today. Today we have Deb Vagins with Equal Pay Today. So with all of that, Deb, can you introduce who you are and what you do with the audience before we dive in?

Deborah: Sure. First of all, thank you so much for having me here today. This is really exciting and fun and such an important issue. I'm so glad you're covering it. So yes, my name is Deb Vagins and I am the National campaign Director within organization called Equal Rights Advocates. They're based in California, but they have folks around the country including a crew of people in Washington, DC where I am.

Deborah: And the other hat that I wear for that organization is I'm the director of the Equal Payday Coalition, and that's a coalition of over 50 [00:05:00] state national and tribal organizations that organize together all year long working on economic justice issues and pay disparities, the wage gap and organize around nine equal pay days a year.

Maggie: Yeah, we've talked a lot about these equal paydays and how they're into November, every time we say that people's jaw hits the floor and they're like, I just thought there was the one in March. And so we love to use this content to really share with our community about the disparity and just the attention we need to bring to it.

Deborah: Yeah. Technically, they go into December, but because it's harder to organize people, you know, some of them are moved earlier purely because we're trying to capture folks' attention. 

Barb: yeah, we talk about this all the time and we educate on it all the time, 'cause some people they don't even know when we say, do you know what, you know, equal payday is. And some people know not everybody. And it's interesting 'cause we are really talking to a lot of financial professionals.

Barb: And I always wanna say, you need [00:06:00] to know this because your women clients, they're not getting equal pay depending on what they're doing. And you know, it's about, their culture, their background, their nationality, all of this comes into play and you need to know about this. And the interesting thing was we pull up these dates every year and Maggie and I could not find them for 2026.

Barb: And I was like, oh my gosh, I wonder if they lost funding.

Deborah: No. Well, there's a really good reason, which is we are about within the next few days, about to announce the slate of days they got delayed because of the government shutdown. That was last year. So there was a delay in the data release. And then we work on the data, but we also organize with, you know, 60, 70 groups who help us co-lead those days, and we wanna make sure those are days that work for them and you know, there's a lot of behind the scenes work to putting on those advocacy days. So I promise you they are coming out, they're coming out shortly.

Maggie: Well, I'm so glad to know these [00:07:00] dates are they're coming out and I appreciate you and the work that you're doing there and all these other groups coming together. As I know, it's no small feat, right? It's collecting the data is a lot of work in itself, but then to get all this advertised and coordinated is no small feat.

Maggie: So we appreciate the work that you're doing there, and I know you've been in the trenches of equal pay fights for decades. What's like a moment early on in your career that kind of lit the fire in you around this issue? Or did you just come out saying equal pay for everyone?

Deborah: Well, I will say that there were some very, very formative years in my household where I saw the impact of economic disparities for my mom, and that was. You know, my mom is probably one of the smartest women, smartest people I've ever known. And to see how she was paid less, purely because of her gender certainly was something that began those thoughts. And then I will [00:08:00] say that I have also, once I started working, I have been incredibly fortunate to witness or work with three women earlier in my career on some of the most significant gender justice fights of the last 30 years, and their bravery still inspires me to this day.

Deborah: So right after college I was working at an organization called Emily's List, which raises money for pro-choice Democratic women running for Congress. And this was in the early nineties, and my boss was assisting Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nominations hearing.

Deborah: She was escorting her around the hill, which gave me the opportunity to hear from her first hand and see the impact of workplace harassment on the world stage and the impact that it had on her.

Deborah: That Was incredibly informative and inspirational. And then later the, you know, that was one of the events that inspired me to go to law school to become a civil rights attorney.

Deborah: And then I became a litigator. And I was one of the first attorneys to work with a [00:09:00] woman named Betty Dukes on what would become the largest employment discrimination case in history against Walmart. And so her courage to represent a class of 1.5 million women against one of the biggest employers in the country was awe inspiring.

Deborah: And then I became that, you know, civil rights lobbyist that I was at the A CLU and I had the privilege of meeting and working with Lily Ledbetter to help her enact the landmark pay discrimination legislation that bears her name. And, remained close friends until she passed just a couple years ago.

Deborah: And looking back, what strikes me about these women is that they all faced workplace harassment, pay discrimination So much courage in coming forward, and this was all before me too lit the public consciousness what they did paved the way for the conversations that we are all having now about workplace equality and I was just [00:10:00] lucky enough to be there for part of it. 

Barb: Wow, that's fascinating. I'm just kind of blown away with what you just said.

Maggie: It also just though, brings me to this perspective of like, Deborah, you're not that old. And so like how short is this history? You know what I mean? It's just like everything you are like, you know, there's so many people we talked to who are like, it is all equal. It's been like this for years.

Maggie: It's like, no, no it hasn't. I mean, you were saying that was in the late nineties.

Deborah: I, well, I would appreciate, I appreciate you saying that. I'm sure it's my Zoom filter. 

Maggie: look fabulous.

Deborah: I've been doing this work for a long time. But interestingly that you say that there is a very short memory in the public consciousness. So let's take this story of Lily Ledbetter, which frankly was only, we passed that legislation in 2000, or enacted it in 2009.

Deborah: So for me, I still have pantyhose that old, or, you know, I'm not wearing it anymore, but I still, for a lot of people that's almost a generation. People don't know the story, so it does seem very recent to me. But I will say when we were, [00:11:00] the Supreme Court had just told her, that she needed to report pay discrimination when the employer started it.

Deborah: As working women, as working people, we know that employers don't really announce when they're beginning their discrimination. This was a ridiculous Supreme Court decision, disconnected from reality, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg sat on the bench, read her dissent out loud, which then was something that had not previously been done frequently to show how she disagreed with this decision. And so from that point, what Ruth Bader Ginsburg said is that now it is in Congress's hands to fix this terrible decision. And there was a group of advocates who banded together. It was my organization and other nonprofit advocacy organizations around Washington DC that banded together to write legislation to.

Deborah: Launch a campaign to rectify how and when you can report discrimination and when you get your day in court and all that. But what was interesting, is when we [00:12:00] started that campaign, so it was a few years before, so 2007 people said. Oh, equal pay for equal work.

Deborah: That was something that we fought and won in the early sixties with the Equal Pay Act or the Civil Rights Act of 1964. People didn't realize that at that point there still was a pay gap of over 20 cents per dollar on average. We sort of take for granted today that it's a kitchen table issue, but it wasn't in 2007 really.

Deborah: People were like, why are you doing this? This was solved decades ago and it's not. And what's great about that? What happened at that time was then, now it's been 20 years, you know, a little less than 20 years since then. And while we haven't solved the issue, and I know we're gonna dig into some of that today.

Deborah: People recognize it as one of their top issues working women, and people understand that it's not solved and understand we need new tools. And so that that does show you that there's sort of a you know, our work is [00:13:00] not done.

Barb: No, and you know, I remember seeing this YouTube video. This was pre pandemic though, and it was all these, like Carol Burnett was on it and all these famous people, and they talked about it would be like 138 years before we saw pay equity. Do you remember seeing that? Or something like that.

Deborah: I don't remember that exact video, but I do remember that messaging campaign. If you were to project out the gap using the way it's diminishing, that it would take a hundred and, you know, x number of years changes each year for it to close.

Deborah: Well, the unfortunate thing is, it's widened it's gotten worse over the last two years. at that pace, it never closes. So obviously we continue the work, so that won't be the case.

Barb: so we talk a lot about in March equal pay day. Can you tell us? When did we start acknowledging equal payday and really, you know, it's nothing to be celebrated really. It's just something to be educated on.

Deborah: So, and actually even though I started [00:14:00] our discussion by saying that the equal pay days have not been announced, I do wanna announce that equal pay day this year is March 26th. So we do have that date on the calendar, and the other eight will be other equal pay days will be set shortly.

Deborah: So the National Committee for Pay Equity, which was a wonderful coalition that existed for decades. They were the first ones that set the equal payday. And over time I had the privilege of collaborating with them. I was on their board and worked with them on helping set that one, that first equal payday.

Deborah: And then the Paycheck Fairness Act Coalition, which was a coalition focused on. Legislation that we need to help close these gaps. Worked with them to sort of take the mantle and start setting the equal paydays. And now I work for Equal Rights Advocates and Equal Payday Coalition, and, and we've now picked up that baton and, and are running with it.

Deborah: And the way it originally worked was it was a day to [00:15:00] mark, not celebrate, to Mark how far women would have to work into a year. To make as much as men worked the year before. And it was all women. Some people think it's just white women, but the equal payday is all women. because it's so important to break out the different demographics because some of the wage gaps are devastatingly low.

Deborah: As I mentioned nine equal paydays that have been built out to recognize, to look at that disaggregation of data to show how bad it is for women. We no longer generally looking at those nine days. We don't usually, use the catchup date in the same way.

Deborah: It's around that time. But essentially these are all just to have a day on the calendar where we mark and are able to organize our communities around advocating for change for the wage gaps that still exist. And the other thing that has changed in all those years, besides more days and is [00:16:00] we used to use what we call full time year round data, which was looking at women who were working all year round full time in the workforce. Well, that doesn't give the entire picture of what it's like for working women. We've got part-time, we've got part year, you've got migrant, you've got seasonal, and once you put all those women's hours into the mix, what we saw was no surprise, the wage gap got even worse.

Deborah: Because women are segregated into lower paid part-time minimum wage, sub-minimum wage jobs. And once you started factoring those jobs into that overall number, then the pay gaps got worse. But it's important to have that data. 

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Maggie: With women it's very common that you see part-time, you [00:18:00] know, because we are juggling taking care of the kids and taking care of the families and all these different things. And so it's so important to bring in all of that data to get that holistic photo. And it's not like, oh, well, they're working part-time, so they're getting the same salary, just half of it.

Maggie: It's like, no, it's, it's so much less than that. You know, it's really docked pay.

Deborah: again, these numbers are an overall number, but what's really important to recognize is, and one we, you know, equal pay today has a platform and a policy agenda that we're about to release at the end of March. We have one that we're just wrapping up right now, and in that we describe our campaign platform, which is it's not just equal pay for equal work.

Deborah: That's super important. But it's also about lack of pay transparency in the workplace. It's also about lack of paid leave, it's workplace harassment, and over concentration in minimum wage jobs. All of those things make the wage gap get bigger, so.

Deborah: So our campaigns are about, you asked me what is so important about this day?

Deborah: Well, we are marking [00:19:00] the sort of the egregious ongoing and sometimes widening wage gaps. We're organizing communities to advocate for change and we're making sure that we are making the invisible visible. And as I've sort of alluded to the, what's been happening now is we've unfortunately erased nearly a decade of progress with the gap widening. The disparities for women of color are really catastrophic. And we are seeing, and you know, I, I won't make assumptions about any politics of, of your listeners, but from the viewpoint of what I do for a living, we are, seeing coordinated attacks on the civil rights agencies that enforce the laws that would help close the wage gap.

Deborah: And so that is something that we've been working a lot on as well.

Barb: Yeah, it's a big fight. I mean, it's a big fight and the gap is widening. we're not narrowing it at all. And when we talk to financial advisors and financial professionals, it's so important for [00:20:00] them to know this information because the population is aging. Women are gonna age solo.

Barb: So if they're making you know less and they're not negotiating, which is another issue, women don't negotiate their pay or negotiate other benefits. It's compounding in the fact that we will always be behind and as we age solo, live longer and age solo, who's gonna take care of us? And so what are the strategies that financial professionals need to know?

Barb: The discrepancy here, that when they're talking to their women clients and women are not a niche market. They are a market. They're 51% of the market, which we've been saying over and over and over again. They are the wealthiest market. They are coming into the largest wealth transfer in history. However, there is such a disparage between pay that if they don't understand this, how can they help them not save their money, but invest their money?

Barb: Teach them about investing and [00:21:00] compounding in the market, and why this is so important to not just put your money in a bank account, but really understand how investing is gonna help them have money for the long term. When they're gonna age solo. So it all starts here.

Deborah: Yeah, and I would say that, you know, one of the things you're exactly right is that. one of the things that I suspect financial planners may not realize when talking to their, female clients is that if you experience a pay gap, if you are making less than you have rightfully earned your life during your career, that money is less money that goes into your retirement because your income is less and less money

Deborah: that goes into your, your social security benefits and all of those things. And so it has a lifelong impact. That is beyond just the, you know, the day to day, the investing, the having the good retirement. It's actually what are the numbers for retirement? And then, you know, those may be the lucky few that are having, being able to have conversations like that at all.

Deborah: What is also happening is when you look at numbers that are in [00:22:00] the 50% to the dollar, right? For native women, for NHPI women then you're talking about a system that is not able to build generational wealth to, to be able to pass on money and even have those conversations.

Deborah: It's a huge impact on, as you said, 51% of the population or more.

Maggie: So kind of now where we're navigating this time when rights protection and economic security all kind of feel shaky at this moment, what do you want women to kind of understand about pay equity as a form of kind of safety and power?

Deborah: Well, so for me, pay equity is a form of safety and power, and everything flows from economic stability, the ability to be housed, to be educated, to be healthy, to take care of elders, to take care of children and economic independence is survival right now. So again, you know, these are the value propositions of my organization.

Deborah: So, you know, when we see [00:23:00] that reproductive rights are under attack, or when workplace protections are being rolled back, when childcare costs more than rent. In some cities, your paycheck is the thing that gives you options. And so it's incredibly important that women are, you know, one of our pillars.

Deborah: is not only that you are being paid. For what you have earned with rightfully what you've earned. But we are also wanna make sure we're also fighting for women being in higher paid and better paid jobs to decrease this segregation into the lowest paid jobs to promote jobs that have paid leave.

Deborah: So you don't have to make a choice between taking care of your family or having a paycheck. 

Maggie: Okay. Some of that is, I get it. And it's so hard though 'cause there's jobs like the teachers and the nurses where it's like, I need you to fix the help the next generation. I need you to, you know, be at the doctor's office. But people just have to go to jobs that pay more. And so it's this yang and this yang because I want my kids to be [00:24:00] educated and have good teachers, you know? And so it's like how do we even just get those positions to have more? 'cause we can't just have these people do different jobs and not have our teachers. And so it's always this back and forth, I feel like, because I totally understand going to a job that wants to pay more. 

Deborah: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, look, this isn't a an easy fix. We've been fighting, there's been the employment and labor fight in America since the inception of the America. and obviously we've we know that this is not a a short term fix, but ultimately the goal would be to have jobs of the type that you're talking about, pay more, have better benefits, make sure that unionization is allowed because that has demonstrated the wage gaps are smaller and unionized jobs, for example.

Deborah: So yes, of course we need a diversity of jobs. We just hope that that one, that jobs will be better, better benefits, better pay, but [00:25:00] also that you won't just. Yeah, happen to see the segregation of being sarcastic. You won't see the segregation of women into the jobs that are lowing or paying, which is what the evidence shows right now.

Barb: So first of all, what advice do you give to women at this point? 

Deborah: Well, I'm not a financial planner but I am so glad that you guys are giving the advice that you are. What I try to do is I try to get people to advocate for change and to know their rights in the workplace. I think unfortunately, what some of the data shows is that when women do negotiate, there is sometimes a backlash to them doing so there's a lot of advice.

Deborah: Women need to negotiate and know their value, know their worth, and do that and negotiate. And I don't disagree, but the problem is if there is someone on the receiving end of that who does not know why that is so, so important, sometimes we've seen a backlash that they are not hired, that they're considered.

Deborah: You know, potentially a [00:26:00] problematic employee because they're ascribing sort of gender roles and gender dynamics to asking for more money, which is incredibly unfair and puts us in a double bind

Maggie: Which, so glad you also like got out of there before you even got in there. But I like, I get that you need a job as well. Like, again, it's, it's good and bad, but it's like, thank you for showing your true colors before I am full fledged into the company.

Deborah: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But some of the things that we do at equal pay day is we organize around certain types of policy change and folks can get involved. Right. So one of the things that has been a real trend recently is what we generally call pay transparency laws, so that is urging employers to post salary ranges.

Deborah: Right? Not like groundbreaking, but it changes the power dynamic, right? So before you would be have to kind of pull a number out of the air. You wouldn't know where you stood with other candidates. You wouldn't know what their budget was. You wouldn't know if you were [00:27:00] low balling yourself or high balling the you wouldn't know.

Deborah: And so why, why put that on you. I mean, the, so what we have been fighting for is salary range postings that give employers the right to know the pay ranges for the job that they're applying for. There are pieces of legislation that we organize around the Salary Transparency Act, and there are states that are working on this at the state law.

Deborah: and like I said, this does, knowing this. Gives you a little bit more parameter if you are going to negotiate. And it seems completely fair. If it's like, you know, 80,000 to a hundred thousand, then you kind of know where you are, you know, if you should apply for it and you know what to say in your interview.

Deborah: So that's, that's one thing. The other thing, again, something sort of small and common sense that you, people might not think about is. How many times have you gone into an interview and someone has said, well, what did you make in your last job so that they can presumably peg your new salary to your old salary?

Deborah: Well, there's [00:28:00] several problems with that. One is, if you are a woman or a worker of color, chances are your salary is less than it should be because you've experienced prior discrimination in an earlier job, and if it keeps getting pegged to that, you never break out of it. So even a good, a high road employer, they may unwittingly be carrying that discrimination forward.

Deborah: So what we've advocated for is a ban on salary history questions. So what it means is that employer, and we all, we know this, I've been an been a CEO myself, an employer. Has what they'll pay for a job, what their budget allows, what the salary ranges are of the other employees that are doing the same work.

Deborah: And if you're not, you should have that. And then you can make a proper offer based on the needs of the company and the experience of the person and their prior salary history should not matter, especially when it's, you know, bringing forward discrimination and, and one of the many things we're advocating for.

Deborah: But a third one that I'll just throw [00:29:00] out there is. We're advocating for, as we've mentioned, paid family leave and paid sick and safe days. And so paid family leave, obviously that's when you have to, you take care of you know, illnesses of family and a lot of people have to drop out of the workplace because they aren't being paid or they aren't being given the leave.

Deborah: And this way you don't have to choose between your family or a paycheck and then sick and safe days. So it's amazing how many jobs where women are overrated don't have those. So same thing. For your health. We don't want people coming to work sick. And we don't want people to lose their jobs because they are.

Deborah: And then safe days is something that's happened recently, which is a great addition for folks that are recovering from or seeking help from domestic violence and abuse. In priors that might not have been considered sick leave, but legislation is being passed so that people can also have protection for that type of necessary leave.

Maggie: I haven't heard about that leave before and I'm [00:30:00] glad that's being talked about and instilled and I can see a whole subset of people just saying it doesn't happen that often where we need this kind of thing. But it does, you know, and it needs to kind of just be talked about in making sure, you know, it's so hard living in a country where your healthcare is tied to your job.

Maggie: And so all these things go together. If you lose your job, you lose your healthcare, you lose this extra support. And so and I've read a lot of articles about how that's just such a big issue. It's tough, but I'm glad, you know, getting that sick leave, nobody wants to be with you at work when you're sick.

Maggie: I don't even care if you're working from home. Like, 

Maggie: take care of yourself. You're not gonna get better if you're not taking care of yourself. And same if you're not in a safe situation. You can't show up to work fully if you can't, if you don't even feel secure. 

Deborah: My last job I was the CEO of the national network to end domestic violence. And part of abuse is often sabotage in jobs so that you lose your economic independence. And so that is a cycle that has been recognized as we work on legislation. And there's, you know, there's pending federal legislation, the what's called the [00:31:00] Family Act and the Healthy Families Act, those are pending in in Congress. There's also the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would deal with the ban on salary history. So all of those things I talked about the reason I brought them up is there's legislation that is pending in Congress.

Deborah: People should call their members of Congress and say they want these protections. It helps everyone and to your point. Unfortunately, I do think there are a lot of women who suffer from domestic violence, but if an employer thinks, oh, it's not that much, there's not much, you know, then they can provide that leave if it's needed.

Deborah: Right. It may not get used, but 

Deborah: maybe it would.

Maggie: Yeah. Let's talk quickly about what actions women can take. I mean, I know you're doing all this great work. What can we do as, as listeners to support that, to help move it along as community members you know, to, to help you fight this good fight and to 

Maggie: help all of us benefit?

Deborah: well you can go to equalpay2day. org. So it's with the number two  equalpay2day.org and we will be releasing our policy platform. We have one now, so you could certainly go and check [00:32:00] that out. The equal Pay today policy agenda and we'll be releasing a new one at the end of March and people should check out that list.

Deborah: It has the federal bills that would help. On all of the things that we've talked about, workplace harassment pay transparency, minimum wage, occupational segregation, paid leave. There's bills you can call your member of Congress. We list the bills by name. You can call them. You can ask for them.

Deborah: We also identify some state bills as well as things may be harder at the moment to get through Congress. There's still lots of progress being made at the state level, and people can look at the ones we have on our list and call their state legislators. And if your state is not on, you can also call your state legislator and talk about it and ask about it.

Deborah: You can write letters and say you care about these issues for your family, for your community, for other women, for other workers. And talk about it, right? You can organize, you can write letters to the editor to talk about it. If you happen to be a business [00:33:00] owner or a small business owner, you can voluntarily do these things.

Deborah: You don't need legislation, right? You can look at your pay scales, make sure that there's nothing that's popping out based on race or gender. You can stop asking salary history questions. Now you can put up the postings in your for your pay ranges and job announcements now.

Barb: we're gonna put all this in the show notes. I mean, making phone calls. I mean, it's the least we could do and we're always about. You know, supporting as best we can women in business, women in general. So these, it's so important that you're sharing this information that we can put in the show notes and, and women can pick up the phone and start having these conversations because there's no time, like the presence, right?

Barb: I mean, there's so much pushback against women today, and we need to start standing up and hearing our voices and just being loud about it.

Deborah: Absolutely, and you can also go to our action page and you can also send emails too, if that's easier for you, 

Barb: Wonderful. 

Maggie: Deb, [00:34:00] there's a question we like to ask everybody on our show, and so you've shaped policy and live the consequences of gender pay gaps. So for you, what is your definition of financial freedom?

Deborah: Well, for me, financial freedom is the ability to make choices based on what's right for you and your family, not based on what you can barely afford. It's power, it's safety, it's dignity, and it's options. Options that often others may be able to take for granted. Financial freedom is about not having to choose between your career and your health or your family's health.

Barb: Powerful. Yeah. Well, we can't thank you enough for just being with us today, sharing all this amazing information for the work that you do and you've continued to do. Thank you so much for that. It's, you know, sometimes our hard work goes unnoticed, but we, we see you. We thank you[00:35:00] we congratulate you and we'll be watching you and supporting you as well.

Deborah: Well, thank you so much. Your show is so important, and I mean, this is the stuff that really makes a difference, honestly. Like sometimes I can send out an email, but I may not be being able to reach the, in the way that you can reach people. So I'm very grateful to be here and very grateful to you.

Maggie: Yeah. Thank 

Maggie: you for this time. I'm so excited for everyone to listen to this episode. So thank you Deborah, and until next time, be financially fearless. 

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