Pay equality for women in the United States is long overdue.

April 22 marks Equal Pay Day, the point in the current year at which women working full-time finally catch up to men’s earnings from the previous year.

Women have made significant gains since Congress passed the Equal Pay Act of 1963.

The act mandates that all workers be compensated the equally for equal work, regardless of the sex of the employee. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 also addresses this type of discrimination. However, progress towards wage parity has been slow.

In 1960, women earned 60.7 cents for every dollar a man did. Now, a woman working full-time earns, on average, 76.9 cents for every dollar a man does, according to 2006 U.S. Census data.

But that’s not good enough.

Plus, women of color are doing much worse. African American women, for example, make only 62.4 percent of what white men earn, according to a 2004 report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

If these current trends persist, it will take 50 years for women to reach wage parity with male workers, according to the Institute. This means that even the youngest women workers today are unlikely to be paid equally.

Over a lifetime, the economic impact of this pay gap is huge. A female high school graduate can expect to earn $700,000 less than her male classmates. With a college degree women fall even further behind men with equal education—$1.2 million worth by the end of their working lives—according to the nonprofit WAGE Project.

Women also continue to be underrepresented in higher-paying fields. While women now make up about half of the total workforce in the United States and earn college degrees at rates comparable to men, only one in five of the country’s science and technology workers is a woman, according to the National Academies.

In addition, women are still concentrated in fields traditionally viewed as “women’s work,” such as nursing, education and sales. This job segmentation drives down wages in these sectors—hurting all workers there, including men.

The pay disparity between men and women cannot be dismissed as due to personal career or family choices on the part of women. In a 2007 study, researchers from the Association of University Women found that even when accounting for personal factors that affect earnings, such as education and hours worked, an unexplained wage gap persists between men and women. The report concluded that this is evidence of wage discrimination.

Today’s working women deserve equality. As a nation we cannot afford to wait another 50 years to reach wage parity. Congress must act now to make pay equality a reality for working women in the United States.

Jill Hopke is a graduate student in the social sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.

Copyright Jill Hopke