Equal Pay Day for AAPI women reveals wider pay disparities within the communitiy

NAPAWF

On average, Asian American women have to work 13 and a half months to equal what white men earn in only 12 months.

Today, Feb. 11 is Equal Pay Day for AAPI women who earn 90 cents on the dollar when compared to white male workers, but that hides the rest of the story.

"Vietnamese and Thai are making 67 cents on the dollar. Bangladeshi women are making 60 cents on the dollar and Nepalese women are making 50 cents on the dollar," Program Director of Equal Pay Today Shannon Williams told CNN.

AAPI women on the whole are actually on the higher end of the wage gap compared to other women.

White women, for instance, still have six weeks of work to do to catch up. Black women have to keep at it through summer. Native American women would have to work through the fall. Latinas have to work into November, 2020 --11 months extra before they catch up.

Women of other races might look at AAPI women and mistakenly conclude that Asian American and Pacific Islander women don't have it so bad. A deeper dive into the numbers reveals that AAPI women are not all doctors, lawyers and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. They also are taking care of the elderly, harvesting food and cleaning offices after everyone had gone home from work.

The ‘model minority’ myth continues to render many AAPI communities invisible in conversations about poverty, economic security, and wage disparities. It also leads to many AAPIs remaining misrepresented or left out of wage data entirely, says a statement from the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum (NAPAWF).

Several AAPI ethnic subgroups experience some of the widest wage gaps among all women. For instance, Hmong and Cambodian women earned on average only 61 and 57 cents, respectively, for every dollar white, non-Hispanic men made.

For certain communities, the wage gap is far greater. Vietnamese women earn $0.64, Hmong women earn $0.57, and Burmese women earn only $0.50, making them some of the lowest paid people in the nation. Even within high earning fields, Asian women are paid less than their male counterparts. "Model-minority" rhetoric is racist, classist, divisive, and just plain wrong.

In reality, many AAPI immigrant women can’t afford quality health care because of racial wage disparities, which are obscured by this myth and hidden in non-disaggregated data, and by policies that turn immigration status into a barrier. That's why the NAPAWF plans to have a separate Southeast Asian Women Equal Pay Day later in the year.

The infographic below from the Economic Policy Institute takes a closer look at the data to debunk commonly held myths about the AAPI women’s pay gap, specifically that a college degree would eliminate the pay disparities.

The graphic demonstrates that AAPI women can’t just educate their way out of the pay gap. In fact, although AAPI women have higher levels of education than white men, when comparing wages of workers with the same level of education, the pay disparities are even greater. Asian American women with a bachelor’s degree only are paid 22% less than their white male counterparts and those with an advanced degree are paid 14% less.