Black women nationwide are still getting paid less than their white male counterparts, but in Mississippi, the disparities are even starker, says Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable Executive Director Cassandra Welchlin.
Black Women’s Equal Pay Day highlights the disparities between how much more time it takes Black women to earn as much as their white male counterparts on average in the U.S. Welchlin said it would take a Black woman an extra seven months into a new year—or until about July—to make what a white man made in the previous year.
“Black Woman’s Equal Pay Day is how much a Black woman has to work into the new year to make what a white, non-Hispanic man made at the end of last year. So now we’re talking about seven months into the new year,” Welchlin told the Mississippi Free Press on July 9. “It doesn’t matter what a woman’s education level is, or even really what her career is. She is still making less on the dollar than her male counterpart.”
Median annual earnings for all Black women in Mississippi show that they make half as much money as what all white men make in a year, with Black women on average taking home $24,929 and white men on average making $48,641, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research 2024 data shows.
Black Mississippi women make 53 cents for every dollar a white man makes, the institute reports. That study did not include the pay gap for white women in Mississippi, but nationally, white women make 83 cents for every dollar white men make, the Pew Research Center reported in 2023.
After a 40-year career, a Black woman on average will have made $1 million less than her average white male counterpart, Welchin said.
The Black women’s pay gap is perpetuated by employers setting employees’ salaries based on their job history and banning employees from discussing their salaries with each other, she said.
About 50% of Mississippi women work, Welchlin noted, but two-thirds of minimum wage workers are women. Eight out of 10 women are the breadwinners for their families, she said, adding that women “fuel the local economy” by using their paychecks to buy groceries, gas, gifts and home items.
“Equal pay isn’t just a woman’s issue; It’s a family issue and an economics issue,” she continued.
The Mississippi Equal Pay Act, which became law in 2022, says that employers cannot pay an employee less than the amount they would pay an employee of the opposite sex working the same job that requires equal performance, “skill, education, effort and responsibility.”
However, employers can still choose employees’ pay based on seniority, meritocratic assessments, quantity or quality of production, or “any other factor other than sex,” the law says. These factors include salary history, continuity of employment, “the extent to which there was competition with other employers for the employee’s services as compared to employees of the opposite sex in the same establishment; and the extent to which the employee attempted to negotiate for higher wages as compared to employees of the opposite sex in the same establishment,” the law says.
Welchlin, who argued at the time that the legislation would not achieve equal pay for women, noted that it did not include race as a provision, meaning employers could choose workers’ pay based on race.
National women’s equal pay activist Lilly Ledbetter, the namesake of the federal Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act who died in 2024, argued in a 2022 op-ed published in the Mississippi Free Press that the Mississippi equal pay legislation was an “alarming deception.”
“Both bills leave Black women out by failing to address racial wage and gender wage gaps, although Black women and other women of color face the largest wage gaps in the state,” she wrote at the time.
Welchlin told the Mississippi Free Press that state lawmakers need to pass a law that empowers equal pay by allowing employees to discuss their salaries, banning employers from demanding salary history and removing continuity of employment policies.
“All those things contribute to the wage gap, and that can be very problematic,” she said.
In an op-ed that Welchlin published in Madame Noire today, she cited President Donald Trump’s new law that cuts the social safety net as even more reason to ensure equal pay for Black women.
“Bottom line, the check is long overdue,” she wrote, “and now—particularly on the heels of vast Medicaid cuts and SNAP reductions among other lifeshifting setbacks—Black women must demand it.”