By Keesa Ocampo
Female-cofounded Filipinx food business, The Sarap Shop, stepping up and building community partnerships that support BIPOC creatives and entrepreneurs through its sauce kits, continues to raise the California standard. Photo by Keesa Ocampo
It is becoming increasingly difficult and counterproductive to separate the conversations of gender, race, and the wage gap. Today, Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) women, on average, earn $0.87 to each dollar that white men earn, as shown in a study by the National Partnership for Women and Families.
But, that overall pay inequity is only a fraction of the #AAPIEqualPay story. For certain communities within the Asian American Pacific Islander community, the wage gap is far greater. Vietnamese women earn $0.67, Hawaiian women make $0.63, Samoan women make $0.62, Hmong women earn $0.61, and Burmese women earn a mere $0.52 to that same dollar, making them some of the lowest paid people in the entire nation. This tells us one thing - that our country systematically devalues women of color and our labor.
It is also said that the wages of AAPI women are driven down by a number of current factors including gender and racial discrimination, workplace harassment, job segregation, the devaluing of jobs dominated by women, and lack of support for family caregiving, which is still most often performed by women. However, a facet that we fail to address is the stigmatizing and injurious myths surrounding AAPI women.
Myth #1: AAPI women enjoy a relatively smaller wage gap.
The value of that annual wage gap is not chump change when we translate what it would be worth to AAPI women, such as:
Nearly eight additional months of child care
Two-thirds of a year of tuition and fees for a four-year public university, or nearly the full cost of tuition and fees for two years at a community college
More than four months of premiums for employer-provided health insurance
Nearly four months of mortgage and utilities payments
Nearly six additional months of rent
Nearly five additional years of birth control
Enough money to pay off student loan debt in just over five years
The fact is that more than 1 in 4 Asian Americans live in multigenerational households, with some particularly high percentages amongst Bhutanese (53%), Cambodian (41%) and Laotian (38%) communities. This means that family incomes, including women’s wages, simply support more people.
Myth #2: AAPI women can close the wage gap through more education.
The wage gap could be called relatively smaller based on the fact that more AAPI women have higher levels of education compared to their white male counterparts. However, when we level the comparison amongst wages of workers with equal educational levels, the disparities are overwhelming.
Myth #3: The Model Minority.
We cannot begin to address the wage gap without also addressing harmful stereotypes against AAPIs like the model minority myth. This rhetoric is racist, classist, divisive and rooted in stereotypes that perpetuate narratives around Asian whiz kids, musical prodigies, their tiger moms, and nerdy men. Where’s the danger in this? It homogenizes a community’s experience, devaluing the differences amongst individuals. It ignores the diversity of experience of Asian American and Pacific Islander cultures, harming the work being put towards racial justice.
We asked several AAPI women leaders about the ways that they’re demolishing these myths and addressing the wage gap and here’s what they shared:
Jemie Sae Koo, Advertising/Marketing
“At Purveyor Group, we place our talent into three categories: 1) junior level, 2) mid- level, and 3) senior level. Depending on their experience and level of expertise, we place them into those three buckets and set a rate range for each level. This way, it avoids any pay discrepancies and creates a more equal environment for our team members. For our newer team members, they typically set their own hourly rates and we give them a 3-month probation to show us what they can do. If they do well, they get bumped up to account level work and we pay market rate (again depending on their experience). We typically pay our talent a little more because we believe that when you take care of your people, they take care of you and, most importantly, our clients.”
Jemie Sae Koo. Photo by Oscar Zagal
Stephanie Ong, Director of Communications for The Education Trust-West, advocates for educational justice and the high academic achievement of all California students, pre-k through college, particularly those of color and living in poverty.
Stephanie Ong, Education Justice
“My mother always stressed the value of a good education, that college is our way to a better future, and that women must always have their own money. Working in education justice, I am fiercely committed to making sure education equity sits at the center of racial justice and gender equality. That means making sure students have access to high quality preschool, a K-12 education system that is fully funded and directs resources to students who need it the most, and equitable access to higher education. It goes without saying we are in a difficult time. Many women, especially working moms in lower paying jobs, are leaving the workforce to focus on their children’s distance learning. I consider myself lucky to be able to focus my energy at Education Trust-West and be part of the solution because I truly believe we cannot have pandemic recovery, racial justice or gender equality without education equity.”
Owner of Tokemoana Foods, at her Redwood City restaurant, serving Polynesian cuisine for the Bay Area community.
Fusi Taaga, Food & Hospitality
“The gender-based wage gap is something I made sure to eliminate in my business. I pay based on position, duties and responsibilities and anyone doing a certain job will get paid the same regardless of gender.
Recently, we have had to hire outside of our family and the asking wage definitely differs between males and females. We interviewed four people for a food prep position. The female applicants asked for $18/hour, while the males asked for $21-23/hour wages. I absolutely believe most Pacific Islander women are conditioned to ask for less because culturally, asking for money is seen as embarrassing, shameful or greedy.”
Similarly, Mildred Deang, President of The MD Group, Inc. shares that, “My industry is perhaps the leading example of pay equity. We staff and recruit nurses, which has traditionally been one of the best paying jobs for women. While they are well-compensated, they should be earning more to reflect the value of their hard work. Maybe if the nursing profession were male-dominated, they'd be paid more.”
With our progress stunted by siloed conversations on gender, culture, race, and the wage gap, the solutions perhaps begin with a more holistic approach and acknowledgment of their intersectionality. We see this exist and persist more so in large corporations in the form of unlawful and unconscionable acts of greed and inequity. The bigger challenge that we need to address today, as a new generation of leaders and entrepreneurs, is how to consciously and collectively move business and our economies to a more compassionate and ethical state of being, one that values women’s contributions to the workforce with not just equal pay, but better wages.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Keesa Ocampo is the CEO & founder of WeSparq, a positive impact creative agency that empowers brands to find their voice and become a force for good in their milieus of influence. She is a two-time Emmy Award-winning writer, director, and producer for television, distinguished during a 16-year career with international broadcast media company, ABS-CBN International. She was recognized as one of the 100 Most Influential Filipinas in the US and received a Presidential Citation for humanitarian work from Her Excellency Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, former President of the Republic of the Philippines.
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