For Immediate Release: August 28, 2024 
Contact: Virginia Lucy, media@napawf.org

NHPI Equal Pay Day highlights the wage inequities experienced by NHPI women

WASHINGTON D.C. – Today, August 28th, 2024 marks Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) Equal Pay Day. Too often, data collection lumps these underrecognized communities into one group without acknowledging the diversity of individual and unique experiences. NHPI women, in particular, are subject to some of the starkest wage inequities when compared to white, non-Hispanic men. 

For every dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men working full time, year-round in 2022, NHPI women, working full time, year-round were only paid 66 cents. But when looking at all NHPI women earners (full-time, part-time, and part-year/seasonal), they bring home a mere 60 cents on average for every dollar earned by their white, non-Hispanic male counterparts. 

“Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Equal Pay Day marks an opportunity for us to acknowledge the disproportionate wage gaps experienced by NHPI women,” said Sung Yeon Choimorrow, NAPAWF’s executive director. “Oftentimes, their experiences are hidden among aggregated data, if at all, not addressing the full picture of NHPI wage inequality. We can only address the gaps in economic and workforce policies by emphasizing the need for disaggregated data and information that accurately depicts how pay discrepancies impact all Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women and communities.”  

NHPI Equal Pay Day helps bust the harmful stereotype of a monolithic, model minority group and promotes the need for disaggregated data collection among the entirety of the AANHPI community. NAPAWF has broadly uplifted the need for continued data disaggregation to promote visibility and understanding, both of which are foundational to addressing the economic barriers that our diverse community faces. 

Statistical policy directives in the federal government are a significant step towards eventually closing the wage gap for the NHPI community. In 2022, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget released a set of revisions to data collection in federal agencies so that federal data more accurately represents race and ethnicity. This represented the first time since 1997 that revisions were made to an otherwise outdated data collection standard. The revisions go into effect in 2024. Agencies such as the Department of Labor and the Census Bureau can leverage this directive to deepen ethnicity and race data sets. 

“We can understand the range of economic mobility experienced by NHPIs through  disaggregated data collection,” said Choimorrow. “Each community has their own specific needs, cultural expectations and financial obligations, and we want NHPI women to access the tools that lead to greater financial freedom. And we can only achieve this by starting with research that acknowledges the resources required to help this community achieve economic justice.” 

Learn more from Empowering Pacific Islander Communities (EPIC)’s Equal Pay Day resources, visit the Equal Pay Today (EPT) NHPI Equal Pay Day page, and follow #NHPIEqualPay on social media to join today’s social media storm at 2pm ET/11am PT.

###

About NAPAWF

The National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF) is the only organization dedicated to uplifting and building power with AANHPI women and girls in the US. Employing a reproductive justice framework to guide our work, we use organizing, advocacy, and communications strategies to assert full agency over our lives, our families, and our communities.