This year marks the 60th anniversary of the 1963 Equal Pay Act and Aug. 15 is Moms’ Equal Pay Day—the day that symbolizes how far into the year a mom must work to earn what men did in the previous calendar year.
An increasing number of mothers, including two-thirds of moms with young children, are breadwinners, and four out of five Black mothers are the sole or primary provider for their households. Yet America’s leaders and laws leave mothers to figure it out on their own—to simply ‘make it work.’ Despite the best efforts of the Biden administration and allies in Congress to invest in caregiving in the wake of the pandemic, every single cent of the care economy investments included in the “Build Back Better” package were left on the cutting room floor.
So what do we do about it?