The latest iteration of The State of Race, a collaboration between GBH, The World, The Boston Globe and the Boston NAACP, will tackle the question: Are women of color on the rise? GBH’s Morning Edition co-host Paris Alston be moderating the panel of women leaders making waves and tackling challenges in the realms of health care, academia, business policy and government. One of the panelists, Eneida Román, the CEO of Amplify Latinx, joined Paris to talk ahead of the event. This transcript has been lightly edited.
The State of Race: Are Women of Color on the Rise? will be held Thursday at 6 p.m. Free virtual tickets are available.
Paris Alston: Thank you so much for joining us. And I want to talk about the event and everything that we're going to discuss. But first, I know that you are new in your role at Amplify Latinx. So tell me how things have been going and what your priorities are.
Eneida Román: Thank you so much, Paris. I'm delighted to be here, and I'm delighted to be part of the conversation tonight. As you said, I am new to my role at Amplify as CEO, but I'm not new to Amplify. I'm actually one of the co-founders. It's really delightful for me to see how we've grown and how we've expanded our reach. And so our goal is to actually close those opportunity gaps for Latinos and for women and other people of color through legislation that makes sense, through policy solutions that address these opportunity gaps.
Alston: I'm glad you mentioned that, because I know that earlier this week you were at the State House, along with a number of other advocates and policymakers who were pushing for salary transparency bills that would require companies with 15 or more employees in Massachusetts to post their salary ranges and share the salaries of their employees. Tell me a little bit about how that will help level the playing field and what are the disparities that exist currently.
Román: That's an excellent question because there is a disparity, despite the fact that we had a wage equity bill passed in the past. This is a little bit different. And I just want to clarify that we can pass these bills without putting an employer at a competitive disadvantage and without burdensome reporting requirements. Because what we're asking is for employers of 100 employees or more to actually share with the state information that they already share with the federal government. The other bill is focused on posting the salary ranges for job openings. And there's at least a dozen other states who are doing this already. So in Massachusetts, we always pride ourselves on being innovative and being ahead of the curve, and being progressive when it comes to equity and inclusion. So this would be another way of ensuring that we are at the top of the game.
Alston: You know, it's interesting, Eneida, because I think back to some of my early days and those conversations about salary negotiations were very foreign to me in many ways. I'm curious about your perspective about how that holds women of color back, and why it is important for people to be able to be transparent about these things.
Román: Absolutely. You're right, because I think that money tends to be a taboo subject for so many of us, and also negotiating on our behalf. I think as women, we're always taught that we want to take care of others, but we kind of put ourselves in the backseat. And I think that also translates into how we negotiate on behalf of others, but not so much on our behalf. And so it's very interesting how we can distinguish between fairness and deserving something, right? As women, we tend to focus on, "Well, that's fair." It's not so much that "I deserve it." And I think there's a gender difference there where when a man is talking about his salary, he describes it as him being worthy of it. And so I think it's important that we normalize talking about our worth and about making sure that it's not selfish. It's something that benefits society in general. It benefits all of us because it it improves the GDP of the nation. It improves the economic prosperity of our families and the security of our homes. I think focusing on, normalizing the subject, and not seeing it as the taboo, because that, in fact, is something that really has affected our ability to negotiate on our behalf, on our own progress.
Alston: It's interesting that we're going to be tackling this question tonight, as I mentioned: Are women of color on the rise? Because we see them in a number of leadership positions, including the one that you're in. We see them in state and federal government. We see them in higher education and in the business sector, etc., etc. But where do the disparities remain?
Román: First of all, the pay equity gap has not improved in 20 years, Right? So that's a reality. That's for women in general. Now, when you look at the pay equity gap for women generally, white women make $0.70 for every dollar their white [male] counterparts make. Now, if we start looking at that, at the numbers, the gap from April until the end of the year, we see that women of color fall even further behind. And so, of course, my focus is on Latinas. And in the work that I do, we see that Latinas literally make half of what their white counterparts make. So they essentially end up working double the time for the same amount of pay. This is due to a number of factors. There's many more Latinas and women of color in entry level positions. So of course the salaries are lower, and so the pathway to the top sometimes has certain obstacles. I think by creating this awareness and by finding policy solutions that help remove the barriers, we clear that path and we remove those roadblocks for women and women of color.
