The Wage Gap Has Everything to Do With Sexism (Even Though People Think It Doesn’t)

Originally published on Lefty Cartoons and cross-posted here with their permission.

We all know the statistics: white women in this country make 78 cents for every dollar that a white man makes, and the numbers get even worse for women of color, with African American women making 64 cents, and Latina women making only 54 cents.

It may seem pretty obvious that this is an issue of institutionalized sexism. And yet, there are those who argue that women get paid less than men because they “make different choices than men.”

Here’s a comic for anyone who’s ever tried to make that argument.

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Barry Deutsch is the Portland-based author and cartoonist of Ampersand, a political comic with a generally progressive sensibility. A new Ampersand comic appears in every issue of Dollars and Sense Magazine. Barry attended Oberlin College in Ohio in the late 1980s, the School of Visual Arts in New York City in the 1990s (where he took classes from comics legend Will Eisner), and graduated from Portland State University several years ago. While at PSU, his political cartoons won the Charles M. Schulz Award. His current comics project is my comic book Hereville, a fantasy adventure comic about an 11-year-old Jewish girl. Check out his blog and follow him on Twitter @barrydeutsch.