Juneteenth shows us that our country can change and that many changes are still needed to achieve equal pay, recognition, and respect for Black women

Yesterday, the United States paused to mark Juneteenth, officially Juneteenth National Independence Day, which commemorates the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States. It’s a day that marks both triumph and tragedy. When the Union Army marched into Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, it had been two and a half years since President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but it was the first time the news of liberation reached this southern town.?

This is only the third year that we as a nation have collectively celebrated the end of legal slavery in the United States, a dark chapter in our history with which we must continue to reckon. To those of you who follow this newsletter, it won’t be surprising that we have women, specifically Black women, to thank for making Juneteenth, originally called African American Emancipation Day , a national day of remembrance and celebration. Lula Briggs Galloway , Opal Lee , Clara Peoples , and many other brave visionaries worked at the local level across the country to build a movement that culminated on June 17, 2021, when President Biden enshrined the newest federal holiday since 1986, when Martin Luther King Jr. Day was recognized.

And while Juneteenth is a fitting time to recognize how far we have come, it’s also a moment to reckon with how much work there is still to be done. Black women know this better than anyone.?( David Leonhardt article in yesterday’s 纽约时报 tells this story with a look at the racial wage gap .)?

According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), in 2021—the most recent year for which data has been made available—Black women earned an estimated 63 cents for every dollar a white man earned. That’s a pay gap of 37 cents or nearly 40 percent. The discrepancy starts early and only escalates as Black women rise in the ranks.?

“A Black woman would have to work until she is almost 80 years old to be paid what a white, non-Hispanic man has been paid by age 60,” explains the National Women’s Law Center’s 2022 Equal Payday report . “In other words, she would have to work five years beyond her life expectancy in order to catch up to her white, non-Hispanic male peer’s lifetime earnings.”

For Black mothers, the situation is even worse. As another 2022 National Women’s Law Center report on working mothers put it, “racial inequities compound the motherhood pay gap.” The upshot is that Black moms working full time earn 49 cents for each dollar a white, non-Hispanic father earns. Annually, they lose nearly $34,000. ?

Of course, the problem is not a single paycheck, or even a single year. It’s the long-term effect of always being undervalued . “Over the course of the average Black woman’s career,” explains LeanIn.org, their “lost income adds up to almost a million dollars compared to white men.”

Needless to say, the discrepancy doesn’t reflect merit or effort. As LeanIn and McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2020 study states, “Black women ask for promotions and raises at about the same rates as white women and men—yet the "broken rung" still holds them back at the first critical step up to manager. For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 58 Black women are promoted.”

Today, there are only two Black women CEOs in the Fortune 500 . Both happen to be mothers.

Even at the highest echelons of professional life, Black women experience—and have to manage—the racial and gender biases that are not only deeply entrenched in our history but also ubiquitous in our present-day professional culture.?

In To the Top, I share the story of Dr. Odette Harris who is a practicing neurosurgeon, a Stanford neurosurgery professor, the Director of the Brain Injury Program for the Stanford University School of Medicine, and Deputy Chief of Staff for Rehabilitation at Veterans’ Administration Palo Alto Health Care System. In other words, she’s about as accomplished an individual as anyone can imagine. Nevertheless, at a national surgical conference she was mistaken by one of the other attendees for the waitstaff and given instructions about how to set up lunch. She let him know that she was at the table, not making the table. The encounter stung. But, she told me, “the realization that she had been stereotyped, not seen, by one of her peers, even though she’d been at the same table as he was all morning and had participated enthusiastically in the conversation, did not come as a shock.”?

At a separate event, where she was keynoting a conference and had her MD credentials stamped on her attendee badge, a man approached her to ask if she was from Maryland. Since she was a Black woman, it somehow made more sense to the guy that she’d have her home state emblazoned on her lab coat than that she could be a medical doctor.?

As one of only eight women in the United States to graduate in neurosurgery the year she finished medical school, Dr. Harris is accustomed to being misidentified. She is regularly stopped and asked for her security badge, even when the place she is going is honoring her with an award. And she is frequently accepted as a competent physician only after proving her Stanford credentials. But that doesn’t mean these moments are not utterly deflating. “Imagine if you had to hold the burden that, for every interaction you had, someone had to validate your existence.”

Dr. Harris’s experiences reminded me that whatever societal expectations and constraints limit us as women in the workplace, for women of color the challenges are exponentially greater. Let’s honor the Black women of our country—not just on Juneteenth, but everyday—by telling their stories, reveling in their accomplishments, and rooting out and changing the damaging beliefs and patterns of behavior that have kept their contributions so vastly underappreciated for far, far too long.?

#tothetop