National Equal Pay Day
Floor Speech
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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I am very pleased to be here with both of the Senators from Washington, one of the few States that have two Senators who are women. It is great to be here with both of them. I would also like to thank Senator Barbara Mikulski for leading the effort for the Paycheck Fairness Act. She is the longest serving woman in congressional history. She has opened many doors for all of us.
When she first wrote her book about women in the Senate, it was called ``Nine and Counting.'' Well, today, our count is even higher, as there are 20 women in the Senate. She was the first woman--Barbara Mikulski was--to chair the Senate Appropriations Committee. Because of her groundbreaking work in this Congress, 10 committees have either a chair or a ranking member who is a woman.
Today, as the presiding officer knows, President Obama formally dedicated a new national monument to honor women's suffrage and equal rights. I am a cosponsor of the bill to have the Sewall-Belmont House named as a national historical site. The Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument is named after Alice Paul and Alva Belmont, two leaders of the National Woman's Party. It will house an extensive collection that documents the history of the movement for women's equality.
What has happened in the last decade or so? Well, in 2009, we passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to make sure that workers who face pay discrimination based on gender, race, age, religion, disability, or national origin have access to the courts. In doing so, we restored the original intent of the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Pay Act.
Now it is time to prevent that pay discrimination from happening in the first place. We all know women have made big strides in our country and in our economy over the last few decades. Women are getting advanced degrees. They are starting new businesses. The Fortune 500 now has 20 women CEOs. That does not sound like much, but when you look back just a few decades, there were not any.
Yet, despite all of the progress we have made and all of the gaps that we are starting to close, women in this country still earn only around 80 cents for every dollar a man makes. When two-thirds of today's families rely all or in part on the mother's income--and in about 40 percent of families the mother is, in fact, the main bread winner--this pay gap has real consequences for American families and our entire economy.
I wanted to focus on one issue at the end here, and that is retirement savings, which are maybe not the first things you would think about when you think about a pay gap. It is probably not what our young pages think about. They don't think: Well, what about what the retirement gap? But, in fact, it is something everyone should be thinking about.
When I was the Senate chair of the Joint Economic Committee, I released a report showing how equal pay affects women's financial security. The report showed that lower wages impact women all throughout their working lives, and these lower lifetime earnings translate to less security in retirement.
According to the JEC report, the average annual income for women age 65 and older, including pensions, private savings, and Social Security, is $11,000 less than it is for men. Social Security retirement benefits are based on a person's lifetime earnings. The average monthly benefit for female retirees is 77 percent less. The same thing goes for pensions. A woman's pension income is 53 percent that of men. Women also receive smaller pension checks from Federal, State, and local government pension plans.
Finally, a recent study showed that the average woman was able to save less than half of what the average man was able to save in an IRA. So what we have here is, first of all, women are making less to begin with. That is what we are talking about today. That means they save less and have less money in Social Security. Secondly, they live longer. That is great, but it means they are going to have less money. Then, finally, we have the fact that they are often a single breadwinner in 40 percent of households. The fact that they take time off often to have children--that is the third factor that leads to less savings.
What we should be doing is looking at how we can address the savings gap. There are ways we can address it by making it easier to save and making it easier to set up 401(k)s and IRAs and looking at the millennials and how we can respond to what is an increasingly different economy for young people. But we also can simply make sure women make the same amount as men when they do the same job.
It was the late Paul Wellstone of my State who famously said: ``We all do better when we all do better.'' I still believe that is true today and so do my colleagues who join me. We need to be focused on how we can help more women share in our economic growth and share in the American dream. I ask my colleagues to support and pass the Paycheck Fairness Act.
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