(NEW YORK) — For months after its doors were shut in March 2020, preschool teacher Rachel Shelton’s old classroom sat as though stuck in a time warp.
Decorations for spring and St. Patrick’s Day still hung on the walls even though the kids — abruptly sent home amid concerns of a new deadly virus — had moved on.
Now, two years after the nation’s schools closed and businesses began laying off workers, Shelton is still out of work, hesitant to return to the classroom because of the high stress and lack of flexibility.
“One runny nose for the little one was like a week out of school, and that happened multiple times … My husband and I — one of us needed to always be on call basically, because there were so many sick days,” she told ABC News.
Last month, a triumphant President Joe Biden declared “America is back to work.”
But, as it turns out, not everyone is.
Most of the nation’s 6.6 million jobs gained since Biden took office have gone to men, according to the Labor Department. As of early February, there were still 1.4 million fewer employed adult woman in the workforce compared to 500,000 fewer adult men.
Simply put, women left the workforce early on in the pandemic at greater rates than men, and they have been more reluctant to return.
Not surprisingly, hardest hit were women in high-stress, low-pay service jobs such as child care and nursing.
“The pandemic whacked women, especially the lesser educated. They’re the ones that took the brunt,” said Richard Fry, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center.
“When you go into you look among the lesser educated portions of the labor force, it’s clear that women have taken a much bigger hit than less-educated men,” Fry said.
Particularly vulnerable were Black women. According to the National Women’s Law Center, unemployment rates dropped or remained the same for almost every race or ethnicity except Black women, with an unemployment rate of almost double that of white Americans. Meanwhile, while many other groups were joining the labor force last month, 31,000 Black women left.
Parenting appears to be a factor, too. According to one analysis, women with children were three times as likely to lose their jobs early on in the pandemic compared to fathers.
Mandee LaCroix, a mom of two girls in Concord, North Carolina, said none of this surprises her. LaCroix ran a child care center during the pandemic before she burned out and quit. At about $10 an hour, her employees earned less than workers at fast-food restaurants and were not offered insurance or retirement benefits. Eventually, she quit and has since gotten a job working with special needs students at a public school.
“It was a lot of stress on my family. I was working a million hours … I was so worn out that it really had stolen any of the joy” of my job, she said.
While there’s no doubt that female caregivers have been hit harder in the pandemic, the current job market also is a golden opportunity for many higher-skilled women, according to Emily Dickens, chief of staff and head of government affairs for the Society for Human Resource Management.
Faced with a worker shortage, many employers are scrambling to find skilled employees and are willing to entertain flexibility they weren’t before.
Dickens says women should jump now if they are considering getting a new job.
“You’ve got to voice what your demands are on the front end and this is the opportunity to do it. This window is going to close,” she said.
Shelton said she’s finally looking for a job again, although she doesn’t want to return to the classroom because of the high stress and inflexibility. It frustrates her that no one has found a solution.
“We’re just not valuing the people who take care of other people, either professionally or in their personal lives,” she said.
(NEW YORK) — By the end of International Women’s Day this year, a Twitter account that sent out hundreds of tweets calling out companies for their gender pay gap had gone viral.
The Twitter account, @PayGapApp, is the brainchild of Francesca Lawson and her partner, Ali Fensome, of Manchester, England, who said they wanted to see companies pay up, literally, to the women they were celebrating.
“It came from a place of frustration of seeing all these lovely messages of empowerment and celebration and inspiration, but without actually knowing whether they were true or not,” Lawson, a 27-year-old copywriter and social media manager, told ABC News’ Good Morning America. “If companies are so keen to promote themselves as celebrating women and equality, then that really needs to come through in their actions as well.”
Lawson and Fensome, a software developer, built their pay gap bot using public data thanks to a pay transparency law in place in the United Kingdom since 2017. The U.K. government requires that companies with over 250 employees submit annual reports on their gender pay gaps based on payroll data.
Fensome said the fact that tweets from the @PayGapApp went viral, shows that people want more transparency when it comes to pay.
“It shows that there’s such a demand for data, for transparency, for accountability,” Fensome, adding that she hopes other similar efforts are started around the world, told GMA. “What we want is for the data to make a difference, and the way that’s going to happen is if it stays in the public eye and people maintain pressure.”
There is no such federal law in the United States calling for pay transparency from companies, although a growing number of cities and states have enacted regulations.
As the country marks Equal Pay Day and as women remain far behind in the workforce amid the coronavirus pandemic, pay transparency is being called upon as a leading solution to close the gender pay gap.
“One of the problems with challenging pay discrimination right now is that it is really easy to be paid less than your male counterpart for years and have no idea that that is the case because most employers keep pay secret,” said Emily Martin, vice president for education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), a policy organization that fights for gender justice. “What pay transparency means, fundamentally, is dismantling the secrecy of pay.”
On average, women working full time, year-round are paid 83 cents for every dollar paid to men, according to the NWLC. That makes Equal Pay Day, March 15, the day that women had to work into 2022 to make what white, non-Hispanic men earned in 2020 alone.
The numbers are even starker for women of color, with Latinas typically earning only 57 cents for every dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men, and Black women typically making 61 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men, according to the NWLC.
When Victoria Walker, a freelance travel reporter, quit her New York City-based job in February as a writer for a travel website, she said she wanted to make sure the person coming in after her made what they deserved.
Because her job salary was not listed publicly, Walker, 29, tweeted her salary advice when she announced her job move on Twitter.
“Before I forget — if you apply for my old job as Senior Travel Reporter, you should ask for no less than 115k, a signing bonus & a relocation bonus if you’re moving to NYC,” she wrote in a tweet that went viral. “In full transparency, I was at 107k.”
Walker said she sent the tweet in hopes that people who applied for the job would not “inadvertently lowball themselves” when it came to their pay. She said she was really surprised by the viral response to the tweet.
“A lot of people who weren’t even applying for the job were like, ‘Wait, this is what travel reporters can make,'” said Walker. “They told me they found they’ve been underpaid and undervalued, and a lot of people didn’t know about signing bonuses and relocations.”
Starting in May in New York City, employers, like Walker’s former company, will be required to include a minimum and maximum salary with job listings under a bill passed in December by the New York City Council.
At least eight states, including Colorado, California, Maryland, Washington and Nevada, and cities already have laws in place that implement some degree of pay transparency, according to Martin.
“The laws vary from state to state, but they all are building on that idea of the importance of giving people who are applying for jobs more transparency, more information about the salary for the job,” said Martin. “And sort of shifting the power dynamics around who controls that information in a way that they can really make a difference.”
Many of the state laws already in effect also have another bonus for women in that they prohibit employers from setting a person’s salary based on their salary in their previous job, according to Martin.
“Those salary history prohibitions are important for ensuring that pay discrimination doesn’t follow someone from job to job through their career,” she said. “When you put these things together, it has the effect of giving the job applicant more power over information and ensuring that the employer doesn’t hold all the cards.”
Because pay transparency laws have been in effect in various states, enough real-world data exists to show that it makes a difference in lowering the wage gap, according to Martin. Public sector employees, like at federal agencies, have also for decades been following a formal grade and steps system that makes salary ranges and information public.
One 2019 study from PayScale, a compensation data and software firm, found that among companies whose female employees described a transparent pay process, women were estimated to earn between $1 and $1.01 for every dollar earned by men.
Tips for women when asking for pay
Katie Donovan, a pay equity expert, has been leading the fight for equal pay for women since 2011, when, while out to dinner, a friend revealed she was being paid $30,000 less than a male colleague whom she had trained.
Donovan, the founder of Equal Pay Negotiations, a pay equality consultancy, said she immediately thought of being underpaid as a woman herself and remembers thinking at the time, “I don’t want my nieces 20 years from now having the same, exact conversation.”
“At the end of the day, our jobs are a financial decision for 99.9% of us that decides every other financial decision, like can we rent, can we buy a house, can we get a car,” she said. “And it’s the financial decision that we have the blinders on, and that’s by design, and that exhausts me.”
Donovan went on to lead the movement to ban employers from asking about salary history in job interviews. She said she sees the next fight in the equal pay battle as making sure that companies offer salaries that are not the median, which incorporates women’s already low pay, but above, which incorporates what white men are getting paid.
“If we really want to finally get a chance of achieving closing the pay gaps, we need to start with changing the data we’ve looked at,” she said. “If we’re aiming for the median of everyone, it’s mathematically less than the median of white men.”
Here are four tips for women from Donovan and Martin:
1. Do your research on salaries beforehand: “In part because of the internet and in part because of these policy changes, we are living in a moment where you can find more information about pay in particular roles and particular companies than you could 10 or 15 years ago, and that is a source of power for workers,” said Martin.
“It always of course is a good idea to do your research in these situations and to learn as much as you can about what is publicly available or what the law requires an employer to provide in terms of pay information,” she said.
2. Be comfortable asking about salary: “There’s a little bit of culture shift happening with employers where there is more of an understanding that posting a salary range is a good equity practice, so we’re seeing more employers do it even where the law doesn’t require it,” Martin said. “That in turn means that it is a more reasonable question for job applicants to ask of employers, even if employer hasn’t posted it, to ask whether that information is available.”
3. In most cases, you’re protected against giving your salary history: “Under the Federal Equal Pay Act, a lot of courts have held that salary history isn’t legal justification for paying a woman less than a man in the same role, so you do actually have some protection against pay discrimination based on salary history,” Martin said.
“That’s one reason why if I were in that position, I would try to gently deflect an interviewer by saying something like, ‘It sounds like what you really want to understand is the salary that I’m looking for in this job, and this is what it is,'” she said. “And hopefully that is informed by some data that you’ve been able to find in the world through sites like Glassdoor and the like about what the market rate is for the position.”
4. Ask for more than the median salary range: “As a candidate, when you’re given a job offer, you say, ‘I’m not accepting median. That’s low,'” said Donovan. “You aim for 75 percentile or higher, because that’s where the white guys are hanging.”
(NEW YORK) — As we celebrate Women’s History Month, ABC News’ Good Morning America is taking a closer look at the gender pay gap.
The latest statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor show that women make 82 cents on the dollar compared to men. And for women of color, the pay is even lower: Black women make 63 cents on the dollar while Latina women make 53 cents.
So what can women do to advocate for themselves and make sure they are being paid fairly?
GMA spoke to TIAA President and CEO Thasunda Brown Duckett, who shared some strategies that can help bridge the gap:
(NEW YORK) — Volkswagen has pulled the wraps off its ID Buzz: a van the company is billing as a spiritual successor to its iconic Microbus. But while the original “hippie bus” was powered by a tiny four-cylinder engine behind the rear axle, the new one runs entirely on electric power.
Chad Kirchner, editor-in-chief EV Pulse, says despite the retro looks and EV powertrain, the Buzz’s main focus is practicality.
“It’s designed to be kind of a mainstream people-hauler first. Just with cues to play into that retro appeal of the Microbus,” Kirchner said.
Volkswagen introduced the first Microbus, the T1, in 1950. Over the next few decades, the vehicle became synonymous with the “counterculture” movement. Microbuses were often given bright, psychedelic paint jobs, replete with flowers and peace symbols. Type 2s are featured prominently on album covers from Bob Dylan and The Beach Boys, and can easily be spotted in footage from Woodstock. Early Microbuses shared an engine with the VW Beetle of the era. The new Buzz, similarly, shares a powertrain with another VW stablemate.
The Buzz sits on VW’s “MEB” electric architecture, which also underpins the brand’s electric crossover, the ID4. The company hasn’t yet released specifications for the American-market Buzz, but did reveal the European model will come with a 201-horsepower electric motor powering the rear wheels. As for electric range, Kirchner says he’s expecting it to be close to the ID4’s 268-mile figure. The Buzz is about five inches longer than the ID4, and according to VW, the European version has 138 cubic feet of cargo area.
“If you want a little more space you’re going to want the ID Buzz,” said Kirchner.
Numbers aside, Kirchner says car buyers’ fond memories of classic VW buses could prove to be the Buzz’s main selling point.
“There is definitely a large group of people out there who are nostalgic for the old Microbus,” he added.
Todd Olson is the co-founder of Buses By The Beach, a car club for Microbus enthusiasts. He says he first became interested in buses after attending a Grateful Dead concert in 1992.
“That’s when it all made sense,” he told ABC Audio. “I saw all these Volkswagen vans, where people can live in them… so that started the bug.”
Olson says he’s now owned, restored, and sold over fifty different Volkswagen buses, and says he’s discovered a vibrant enthusiast community in the process.
“Buyers of Volkswagen [buses], they’re counterculture people, they’re a little different,” he says. “They dance to a different beat.”
As for whether the new Buzz can dance to that rhythm, Olson says his initial impressions are positive.
“I think it’s a very cool concept,” said Olsen. “I’m excited to see the vehicle.”
But he has concerns that the limited range of an electric vehicle could put a damper on its appeal.
“The owners of those vans — they want to roll, they want to travel and follow the Grateful Dead … follow Phish,” said Olson. “That pure-EV vehicle unfortunately just doesn’t have the range yet.”
The Buzz is set to go on sale in Europe later this year. It hits US dealerships in 2024. Olson says despite his reservations, he still wants to take it for a test drive.
“When the new one hits the showroom floors, we’re definitely going to go give it a try,” he said.
(NEW YORK) — As the world aims to figure out ways to live and shop more sustainably, Target is adding to those efforts with one of its latest initiatives.
The brand announced Target Zero this week, which essentially gives shoppers a better idea of which products help to reduce waste.
Throughout the store as well as online, there will be icons that display which items are designed to be refillable, reusable or compostable, made from recycled content, or made from materials that reduce the use of plastic.
“By making it easier for our guests to identify which products are designed to reduce waste, Target Zero helps them make informed decisions about what they purchase and advances a collective impact across our brand partners, our product shelves, and within our homes and communities,” Amanda Nusz, the senior vice president of corporate responsibility and president of the Target Foundation, said in a statement.
The assortment of offerings that will be tagged under Target Zero includes hundreds of new and existing products across beauty, personal care and home. There are also plans to expand into other categories in the future.
Target’s latest initiative falls in line with its commitments to the company’s sustainability strategy, Target Forward, which aims to collaboratively work with shoppers to elevate sustainable brands while also pushing to eliminate waste.
“We can’t wait to introduce our guests to Target Zero because we recognize their growing calls to find products that fit within their lifestyle, designed with sustainability in mind,” Jill Sando, Target’s executive vice president and chief merchandising officer, said in a statement.
She continued, “Our aim with Target Zero is to keep delivering on their needs through our ever-evolving product assortment, as well as to give brands investing in reduced waste products and packaging an opportunity to have those products highlighted by Target.”
Target fans looking to consciously shop can look forward to zero-waste innovations from brands such as Burt’s Bees which uses recyclable metal tins for its lip balms without single-use plastics, as well as PLUS which is a body wash created to eliminate excess water and waste by using a dehydrated, dissolvable square that transforms when wet.
The company said it has a goal of becoming a market leader for curating inclusive, sustainable brands and experiences by 2030 as well as aims to make 100% of its owned brand plastic packaging be recyclable, compostable or reusable by 2025.
(SAN DIEGO) — Rising gas prices in the U.S. amid sanctions on Russian oil have some Americans feeling hesitant about any plans for a summer road trip. But tourism officials in one summer hot spot say they don’t think gas prices will hurt travel there much.
In San Diego, hotel owners like Bob Rouch say business has returned to pre-COVID levels. It appears that so many people want to travel and get out without masks that the desire to travel this summer outweighs any reluctance due to rising gas prices.
“I know some people refer to it as revenge travel,” Rouch said. “I think it’s people wanting to get out.”
Tourism officials say places like San Diego will likely fare well despite high gas prices because the city is a quick drive with minimal fuel burn from locations like Phoenix, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Northern California.
(NEW YORK) — With inflation at a 40-year high, Americans are seeking ways they can save some money on everything from gas to groceries.
The next time you hit a supermarket, there are several strategies you can use to help you stay on budget. Buying frozen meat and produce, opting for generic brands and buying in bulk are just some ways you can compensate for record-high prices.
ABC News’ Becky Worley shared more tips consumers can use the next time they shop for groceries:
(WASHINGTON) — Inflation spiked again last month, increasing 0.8 percent in February after rising 0.6 percent in January, the latest figures released Thursday by the U.S. Department of Labor show.
Compared to February of last year, the Consumer Price Index, which measures the change in prices customers pay for goods and services, is up 7.9%, marking a four-decade high.
The Labor Department said the biggest price hikes were for gasoline, shelter and food.
To kick things off, the company will debut its Blissfeel shoes, which have an upper panel that supports movement and underfoot foam cushioning technology. The shoe will be available in 10 spring-ready shades.
Lululemon will also introduce three other shoes, including Chargefeel for cross-training; Restfeel, a slide-style shoe for post-workout; and Strongfeel, which is an all-around training shoe.
“Footwear is the natural next step for us to expand and apply our long history of innovation in fit, feel and performance, and it represents an exciting moment for our brand,” Lululemon CEO Calvin McDonald said in a statement. “We are entering the footwear category the same way we built our apparel business — with products designed to solve unmet needs, made for women first.”
Lululemon’s chief product officer Sun Choe also shared in a statement that the brand started with women’s shoes first as a result of noticing that they are often designed for men and later adapted for women. “That didn’t sit well with us,” said Choe.
She continued, “Innovating for women is in lululemon’s DNA — now we’re bringing that same expertise to footwear, and women were part of this journey every step of the way.”
While the brand is initially launching for women, there are plans to create a men’s footwear collection in 2023.
(WASHINGTON) — The House Judiciary Committee wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland alerting him of potential “criminal conduct by Amazon and certain of its executives,” in a letter written by members of the committee and obtained by ABC News.
The judiciary committee, led by Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline, alleges Amazon lied to Congress over whether it used data it collected from third-party sellers.
“Throughout the course of the Committee’s investigation, Amazon attempted to cover up its lie by offering ever-shifting explanations of what it called its ‘Seller Data Protection Policy,'” the letter says. “Among other things, in written statements to the Committee, Amazon made a distinction between the “individual” seller data that Amazon supposedly protected and the “aggregated” seller data that its private-label business could use.”
Amazon also allegedly lied to Congress about manipulating consumers’ search results, according to the committee.
“After Amazon was caught in a lie and repeated misrepresentations, it stonewalled the Committee’s efforts to uncover the truth. The Committee gave Amazon a final opportunity to provide evidence either correcting the record or corroborating the representations it had made to the Committee under oath and in written statements,” the letter says. “Instead of taking advantage of this opportunity to provide clarity, however, Amazon offered conclusory denials of adverse facts. In a November 1, 2021 communication to the Committee, a senior Amazon official dismissed the reports as inaccurate, attributing them to ‘key misunderstandings and speculation.'”
The judiciary committee further accused Amazon of refusing to turn over any documents related to the investigation they claim to have run on the manipulation of consumer search results.
The bipartisan letter also claims Amazon obstructed a congressional investigation.
“Amazon and its executives appear to have been “acting with an improper purpose” “to influence, obstruct, or impede . . . the due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry under which any inquiry or investigation is being had,” the letter says. “Amazon has declined multiple opportunities to demonstrate with credible evidence that it made accurate and complete representations to the Committee during the Committee’s digital-markets investigation. The Committee’s findings and credible investigative reports suggest that Amazon’s representations were misleading and incomplete. And Amazon’s failure to correct or corroborate those representations suggests that Amazon and its executives have acted intentionally to improperly influence, obstruct, or impede the Committee’s investigation and inquiries.”
All of these reasons, the letter says, amount to enough substance for a Justice Department referral “to investigate whether Amazon or its executives obstructed Congress or violated other applicable federal laws.”
“There’s no factual basis for this, as demonstrated in the huge volume of information we’ve provided over several years of good faith cooperation with this investigation,” an Amazon spokesperson told ABC News.
A Justice Department spokesperson said the department has received the letter and will review it.
