Latina Wage Gap Is Widest in 20 Years. How Did We Get Here? | Mónica Ramírez, President and Founder of Justice for Migrant Women
What’s up, Moneda Moves community?
No one should be left behind in our mission to achieve equal pay, even for Latinas. Yet, in 2024, the Latina pay gap widened for the first time in 20 years. That's impacting Latinas across the board and in most disparate ways our caregivers, mothers, farmworkers, and people working in hospitality.
My time reporting out of NYC reminds me of a time when I covered farmworkers and activists marching 200 miles to Albany to demand basic workers' rights, including collective bargaining, workers’ compensation, and unemployment benefits. This was finally granted in 2019 via the Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act.
This week’s guest is Mónica Ramírez, an attorney, author, and activist. She is the founder of Justice for Migrant Women and co-founder of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, The Latinx House, and Poderistas. Mónica has received numerous awards, including Harvard Kennedy School’s first Gender Equity Changemaker Award, Feminist Majority’s Global Women’s Rights Award, and the Smithsonian’s 2018 Ingenuity Award. She was named to Forbes Mexico’s 100 Most Powerful Women’s 2018 list, TIME Magazine’s TIME100 Next list in 2021, and the Association of Latino Professionals for America’s (ALPFA) Most Powerful Latinas list for 2024.
Now more than ever, it’s so important to be aware of the inequities our communities face at all levels and to call them out. If we are ever going to see the equal pay we deserve, we need to bring marginalized workers on this journey with us. That includes the farmworkers, janitors, and caretakers. At Moneda Moves, we applaud how our community is building generational wealth through entrepreneurship, leading companies, and career progression. But in our interview with Mónica, we discuss how the best way to move forward as a community and to close the wage gap is to respect individuals across industries that power our society in search of equity. There is no room for disparaging the same jobs that gave the next generation a leg up in the first place.
In this week’s episode, Mónica highlights why the pay gap is widening and what we can do to fix it. The fight for equal pay is a long road ahead, but we can start within our own communities. Latinas are making on average 51 cents on the dollar compared to our white, non-Hispanic colleagues. This pay gap is affecting Latinas in white-collar jobs and blue-collar alike. We have a lot of work to do to fix this, and Mónica is here to teach us how.
No te lo quieres perder.
Follow Mónica on Instagram: @activistmonicaramirez
Follow Moneda Moves on Instagram: @MonedaMoves
Follow your host Lyanne Alfaro on Instagram: @LyanneAlfaro
Main podcast theme song from Premium Beat. Our music is from Epidemic Sound.
