Perspectives

The Office of Economic Empowerment will continue its mission to close the race and gender wage gap, and promote racial equity, and work to ensure EVERYONE has access to safe and affordable reproductive health care.

Alayna Van Tassel, the Office of Economic Empowerment’s Executive Director, reflects on the 2021 EqualPayMA Roundtables and discusses where we go from here in our fight for equal pay.

Nicole Coakley shares her experiences and thoughts on the obstacles Black women face in achieving pay equity.

Massachusetts has a long history of trailblazers leading the way on the fight for “equal pay for equal work.”

Data suggest dramatic differences in financial well-being by race.

The landscape is still male-dominated, which often makes getting into – and succeeding in – the tech field challenging for women. 

As Chief Operating Officer of ALPFA (Association of Latino Professionals For America), Migdalia’s goal is to create a future where any Latino can look in any direction, in any industry, and find a Latino role model to emulate.

The measurable costs of economic inequality represent costs that are bigger and harder to quantify – loss of safety, loss of health, loss of connection, loss of opportunity, struggles to support the people we care about, absence of time or mental energy for the things that bring us happiness or hope or peace.

Both when we try to analyze the communities that we are serving and when we turn our analytical lens back on ourselves as institutions, we have little hope of successfully tackling the wage gap, or any of the other issues facing minority populations, without an intersectional approach.

June is traditionally LGBT pride month, and Massachusetts has a lot to be proud of. In 1989, we became the second state to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation (gender identity took longer). In 2004 we became the very first state to have marriage equality for same-sex couples. In spite of these victories for legal equality here and elsewhere, though, LGBT people continue to face wage gaps and other forms of economic inequality.