I rise today in solidarity with my fellow sisters in the Senate and across the country to speak to what is known as National Pay Equity Day. Really, it doesn’t have much to do with equity at all—rather inequity and inequality—as it marks how far into the year a female must work, on average, to earn as much as a male earned the previous year.

Michigan residents are already facing enough economic challenges—high gas prices, growing education and tuition costs, the continued home foreclosure crisis, and a tough job market. Every penny definitely counts these days, but unfortunately, they still don’t count the same for men as they do for women. Women’s earnings in 2006 were 76.9 percent of men’s, leaving the wage gap statistically unchanged from last year, according to U.S. Census statistics released in August 2007. That means women are essentially getting paid 33 cents less than men for every $1 they earn.

There are only two states that are worse than Michigan in terms of the gender wage gap, and it’s time to change that. The current wage gap adversely affects all working women, but especially single-mother families, young women starting careers and saving for retirement, older women struggling to survive on limited investments, and women of color, who are often discriminated against in both sex and race. Even women with competitive education and skills are not achieving pay equity.

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act. Back then, women made 59 cents for every $1 that men earned. So much has changed since then, but conversely, we have made very little progress in reaching true financial equality, gaining only 18 cents per $1 of men’s pay in that time. Forty-five years after the passage of the Equal pay Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, women in the workplace are still undervalued, underpaid, and shortchanged.

As elected officials, we should be working together—as men and women, Republicans and Democrats—to close that gap and bring such wage disparity to an end.