Ahead of Equal Pay Day on March 25, 9to5 members spoke at a virtual town hall to discuss the inequities that lead to the pay gap in child care.
Equal Pay Day is a sobering reminder of the difficulty child care educators – most of whom are female and people of color – face when attempting to care for themselves and their families. With so many women and people of color in the field, inequities in pay create disparities that have massive ripple effects.
In 2024, women’s earnings were 84 percent of men’s earnings. The average full-time female child care educator made $11.54 per hour. The average full-time male child care educator made $12.58 per hour. Roughly 92 percent of child care educators are female and eight percent are male. While there are less men in the field, men still make $1.04 more than the average female child care worker.
According to CLASP, “Though the U.S. child care system has changed over the course of history, the labor of Black women continues to be underpaid and undervalued. While 18 percent of child care workers are Black, Black people only compose 13 percent of the overall U.S. workforce. Despite their overrepresentation in the child care workforce, Black women earn less on average than their white counterparts in a field that is already woefully underpaid, with the average worker earning $30,370 in 2023. For center-based providers, the wage gap between white and Black workers amounts to an average of more than $8,000 per year. Workers in home-based child care programs, which Black providers operate in higher numbers, earn even less.” Learn more here.
It is time for the nation to value child care and the hearts and minds that provide it. Child care educators are the workforce behind the workforce and should be honored and compensated as such. Regardless of the hue of skin, all children deserve access to affordable and accessible care. All families deserve care that meets their family’s unique needs. And all child care providers deserve competitive wages and benefits that allows them to recruit and retain child care educators, and better care for themselves and their families.