The Deeply Disturbing Truth About Street Harassment in America A new study sheds light on how public spaces are not safe spaces, especially for women. On June 3, Stop Street Harassment, the gender justice nonprofit that founded Anti-Street Harassment Week, published “Unsafe and Harassed In Public Spaces,” the first comprehensive, nationwide report on street-harassment. “This is the largest study that has been conducted in the United States,” said Holly Kearl, founder of SSH and author of the report. “It’s the largest sample size, the first to include both men and women as respondents at the national level, the first to look at the findings to see how race, sexual orientation, and income impact people’s experiences.” Turns out, public spaces are not safe spaces, especially for women. The number of women and men who reported having experienced street harassment is 65% and 25% respectively. A major finding of the SSH study, however, is just how much contact is being made. Fifty-seven percent of all the women surveyed reported verbal abuse, and 41% reported physical aggression and violence. 84% of women who reported street harassment said it happened to them multiple times.
Holly Kearl is a former Legal Advocacy Fund Director for AAUW. Her work is important far beyond just the street, because disrespect and harassment on the street walk into the house, the workplace and the schoolroom every day.
How Retailers Could Narrow The Gender Pay Gap And Lift Women Out Of Poverty Women make up about half of the retail workforce. But compared to their male counterparts, they are far more likely to live in poverty, accounting for 55 percent of low-wage retail workers, according to a new report from the think tank Demos. The typical woman who works as a salesperson makes just $10.58 an hour, or about $22,000 a year working full time. That’s below the poverty line for a family of four. In fact, 1.3 million women in the industry live in or near poverty.
The women who make up the retail sales-force aren’t teenagers earning pocket money. More than 95 percent of those who work year round are 20 or older and more than 40 percent are raising children. Nearly half contribute at least 50 percent of their family’s income, and one in six are the only earner in their families.
Part of the reason women are struggling in retail is that they suffer from a wage gap. Throughout the industry, the typical woman makes 72 percent of what a man makes. Salespeople have an even bigger gap, as women make $4 less per hour than men on average.
But these problems would be at least partially solved, the Demos report argues, if retail companies with 1,000 or more workers paid them at least $25,000 a year for full-time work. More than half of women who work full time year round at retail companies earn below that level and are 22 percent more likely than men to do so. If wages were increased to that threshold, 3.2 million female retail workers would get a raise, typically by about 27 percent. That compares to 2.5 million men. That would lift 437,000 women above the poverty level and significantly narrow the wage gap, the report notes.
The benefits of such a pay raise would trickle outward as well. Demos estimates that GDP would grow by $6.9 to $8.9 billion from the increase in women’s pay given that they would be able to spend more money on goods and services. That would support the creation of 105,000 to 136,000 new jobs.
Women In Sales Must Work 103 Extra Days A Year To Make As Much As Men Women in sales and related jobs have work 103 extra days every year just to earn the same amount of money as their male colleagues bring in. That’s nearly double the average gap for all jobs, which comes out to about 59 more days per year that women need to work to earn the same as men.
“It’s really striking, because it’s the most common occupation in the country right now,” Amy Traub, a senior policy analyst at Demos and the author of the study, said of retail work. “It’s not a job that’s going away.”
Great Britain:
Gender pay gap hits middle-earning women hardest ONS figures show full-time female workers earn 15.7% less than men overall. The latest figures on Britain’s sex pay gap show that the disparity is widest among middle earners. In an in-depth examination of earnings across occupations, the Office for National Statistics figures show that the pay gap – which grew for full-time workers in 2013 to 15.7% from 14.8% the year before – runs right across the spectrum of education and qualifications but rises markedly among those who have good exam results at school but have not gone on to higher education. Women whose highest qualifications are at GCSE or standard grade level can expect to be paid on average 18% less an hour than their male counterparts – £9.52 to £11.87. For people with no qualifications at all, the gap is narrowest, 14.3%, with women earning £7.59 an hour and men £9.09.