Six years ago, I was waiting at the Columbus, Ohio, Greyhound station to return to college in Pittsburgh. It was fall break during the first semester of my first year. I was the first in my family to attend college, and some of my neighbors said I was one of the few on our block to leave home at all. I was regretting that decision.
Why was I transplanting myself from a place where I constantly saw black faces like mine represented in all aspects of life to a place with so few? In Pittsburgh, I found black faces only in pockets. In classes, there were some. Sometimes it was just me.
The city was very welcoming, so I couldn’t grasp anything tangible to explain my feelings, but I felt like an imposter. I was not sure if I belonged.
Maybe it had to do with the fact that my mother had passed away three months before I started school. I was attending college to pay it forward for her.
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My father stood with me as I waited for the bus to return to Pittsburgh that fall. Nana reassured me and said that, despite how I felt, this was an opportunity I should embrace, that I could become everything that other women in my family could not.
I got on the bus. And moving forward, I took advantage of every opportunity presented to me.
After graduating from college, I chose to remain in Pittsburgh because of the doors that opened for me here. I was offered a fellowship in public affairs with Coro, a leadership development program that has placed me for now with the Women and Girls Foundation, where I helped organize its annual Equal Pay Day Rally last week.
The foundation gave me another recent opportunity: I got to hear Hillary Clinton speak at Carnegie Mellon University. Before she started talking, I texted my dad, joking about how far I’d come: I was so close to the former secretary of state and potential POTUS that I saw a Secret Service agent slide her a cough drop!
I especially tuned in when Ms. Clinton mentioned eliminating the gender wage gap. She pointed out that American women on average earn only 78 cents for every dollar that a non-Hispanic white male makes. The figure for black women, she said, is 64 cents.
Even though this last point was just a fragment of a sentence, it spoke into existence the economic disparities facing black women and their families in Pittsburgh that I’d been seeing.
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Southwestern Pennsylvania slightly lags the national average in terms of how much women earn compared with men (an estimated 75 cents to 77 cents on the dollar.) Black women here do slightly better than black women nationally (71 cents on the dollar) but still fall short of what white women make. With an average annual income of $37,148, they rank seventh lowest among the top 40 metro regions.
It’s shocking. For black women who work full-time and year-round, the wage gap represents the loss of enough income to purchase more than two years’ worth of food, or almost 10 months’ worth of mortgage and utility payments, or more than 16 months of rent, or more than three years’ worth of family health insurance premiums.
Black women employed in service occupations do even worse. They are more likely to work part time and earn the minimum wage or less. Black women in Pittsburgh are employed in service positions at a higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group.
The effects on the economic security and health of families can be dramatic. Seventy-three percent of households living in poverty in the Pittsburgh region are headed by single females with school-age children, and about 67 percent of those families are headed by black women. The national average is 54 percent.
Black children have the highest infant mortality rate in Pittsburgh: 12 percent. Pittsburgh has the sixth-highest poverty rate in the nation for black children under 5 years old.
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The wage gap must be eliminated so that black women can support themselves and their families. At the current pace of wage advances for women, this will take more than 100 years.
As a recent college graduate, I may earn 20 percent less than white male peers, and that gap could increase to as much as 50 percent over a lifetime.
If I stay in Pittsburgh, what would be my quality of life if this doesn’t change? Could I at some point afford a home or support a family?
While researching the wage gap, I thought back to Nana’s words, and I wondered: If I stay in Pittsburgh, will I really be able to become everything that other women in my family could not?
Ciera Marie Young is a Coro Fellow currently serving as public liaison for the Women and Girls Foundation (cyoung.fellow@coropittsburgh.org).
First Published: April 23, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
