Following is the statement of Democratic Party of Wisconsin Executive Director Maggie Brickerman, co-chair of the Party’s Women Against Walker group, on Equal Pay Day.
“President Obama said it best when he said ‘women are not a special interest group.’ We are your wives, your mothers, your aunts, your sisters, your daughters and we want to be treated fairly, valued as equal partners and respected as able to make decisions about our own bodies.
“But the extreme right-wing, like Scott Walker and his Republican Tea Party, seem to disagree. Despite their best efforts to portray their shameful War on Women as mere ‘fiction,’ their actions have devastated programs critical to women and children’s health, interfered in the relationship between women and their doctors and stripped pay equity protections for women, veterans, seniors and disabled workers.
“Today, women all over Wisconsin will wear red to symbolize how far women are “in the red” with their pay and will rally to raise awareness about wage inequity and attacks on women’s rights, as part of a coordinated, nationwide effort to take a huge step forward for fairness. We will continue the fight at the ballot box to elect candidates to office who share these values.”
Equal Pay Day was originated by the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) in 1996 as a public awareness event to illustrate the gap between men’s and women’s wages. The date, April 17, symbolizes how far into the year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year.
