Today a bill will hit the floor aimed at forcing transparency in companies when it comes to salaries. Currently, according to Working Mother magazine, 68% of married women work outside the home and 75% of unmarried, separated or divorced women do. That’s a lot of women working to bring home a paycheck and contribute to their family’s security and well-being.  And it’s been going on for a long time. I’ve mentioned this before but my grandmother worked outside the home as a nurse, even after she was married and had kids. My mom worked a good part of my childhood. And I am working.

Before I start blasting the people who feel it’s okay to pay someone less based solely on gender or race, I wanted to say why I’m working, and maybe why others are working too. There is the financial reasons of course, but since I’m in education I’m definitely not the breadwinner (cue irony). Then there is the idea of a career. I was raised to believe that I should have a career, that I should pursue my passion with abandon and follow it through. So I went above and beyond- I sought out and achieved a Master’s Degree. Less than 12% of the U.S. population over the age of 25 have a Master’s Degree (Educational Attainment in the United States) and I wanted to be one of them. I spent two years working a variety of jobs, going to classes and writing the most difficult paper of my life. Then, when I was finished I got a job in my field and loved it. When Matt and I got more serious I got a job closer to him and moved back to the Piedmont. Then I found my “dream job” and took that right as we were starting a family.

Leaving your baby in the morning is hard. It’s hard physically because you are sleep deprived but it’s especially hard emotionally because you love this person more than you ever thought it was possible to love. But each morning I get up and do it because I love my job, too. I love to learn. Each day when I go home I feel like I am slowly carving out my own future because I get to work with this great group of kids. But when I go home I am home (at least 90% of the time). I try really hard not to work at home, or at least not until the baby is in bed. I focus on being a mom and a wife and loving my little family. I can say that it does get discouraging when I realize how much more every guy I know is making compared to every woman I know. It’s a problem that puts the U.S. 77 in a list of developed country with regards to how we pay our women. We often hear about the “War on Women”, then hear lawmakers say not to politicize women. But I rarely hear one say “Why don’t we pay them fairly?” Because when you look at the numbers, there is only one sex that is struggling to help support their families.

Today, the Paycheck Fairness Act will hit the floor. It has come across the floor once before, where GOP lawmakers overturned it, saying it would create undue hardship for employers with the lawsuits that would inevitably crop up. Which I think tells us all we need to know. By working to keep us distracted with other issues, this bill has been squashed. And I think it’s time that it came to the forefront. Women aren’t treated equally, they aren’t paid equally, and there is not a doubt in my mind that the men who are trying to overturn this bill don’t think of us as equal.  But imagine if we could get it passed. Imagine if we could go to work knowing what our true worth is, instead of knowing that the guy next to us is getting paid more because he’s a guy.

The first time I ran across this was in college. I was working as a hostess at a restaurant. Answering phones, taking reservations, seating people. Not the most difficult job (though I would disagree on a Friday night when a staff member would quit at 8 p.m.) but I did my work and sometimes a little more. At some point a guy came on as a host. He would answer phones, take reservations and seat people. So far, sounds like the same job, right? Except he made TWICE as much as I did per hour. I remember finding this out through another staff member who was upset about it. She thought it wasn’t fair. But I wanted to give my management the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he was doing something else for them that we weren’t. Maybe he was handling money or running errands or something that I was missing. And then it turned out he wasn’t.

If we pass this act, there will be lawsuits. But they will exist because the women in those companies are not being paid equally for equal work. And I know I would rather have a bunch of lawsuits on my hands, fighting for equal rights, then to have to explain to my daughter when she grows up that many people just won’t think she deserves the same amount of pay as a guy because she’s not one.  I don’t want her to have the sinking feeling in her chest of knowing that people you like and admire decided you deserved half as much pay because you’re a woman.

I do believe there is a war on women. There are a lot of people out there who want to control our bodies, who want to control what we’re able to do, and, as evidenced here, how much money we make compared to our male counterparts. It’s time to fight back. We’ll do it for all the working mothers out there, and we’ll do it for all the sweet babies at home that we love.