Women's Equality Day: How Far We've Come, and How Far Mothers Still Have to Go
Every August 26th, the United States marks Women's Equality Day — commemorating the certification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, which secured women's constitutional right to vote after decades of organizing, protest, and sacrifice by suffragists. It's a day worth celebrating. It's also a day worth being honest.
Because more than a century after women won the vote, true equality — economic, physical, and social — still hasn't arrived. And nowhere is that gap more visible than in the lives of mothers.
The Wage Gap Doesn't Hit All Women the Same Way
We talk about "the gender pay gap" as if it's one flat number, but it isn't. It widens dramatically the moment a woman becomes a mother. Full-time working women in the U.S. earned about 81 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2024, with median annual pay of $57,520 compared to $71,090 for men. But for mothers specifically, the gap is far steeper — research shows mothers earn somewhere in the range of 62 to 74 cents for every dollar fathers earn, with households that include children showing roughly a 35% pay gap between mothers and fathers.
This isn't really about ability, ambition, or hours worked. Researchers consistently find that the "motherhood penalty" — not gender alone — accounts for the majority of the overall gender pay gap, and each child under five is associated with a further drop in a mother's earnings. Meanwhile, fathers, on average, see no such penalty — and often a small wage premium instead. The message embedded in that data is hard to miss: having children costs women money, and it costs fathers little to nothing.
Giving Birth Is Still More Dangerous Here Than It Should Be
Women's Equality Day is about rights — and there's no more basic right than surviving childbirth. The U.S. remains a stark outlier among wealthy nations on this front. In 2022, an estimated 22.3 American women died per 100,000 births during pregnancy or within a year of it — far above comparable wealthy countries, and the disparity by race is staggering: white mothers died at a rate of 19 per 100,000 that year, while Black mothers died at a rate of 49.5 per 100,000, roughly two and a half times higher.
A country can call itself equal. Its maternal mortality data tells a different story.
We Still Don't Guarantee Mothers Time to Heal
Most industrialized nations guarantee mothers paid time to recover from childbirth and bond with a newborn. The U.S. does not. The Family and Medical Leave Act only guarantees 12 weeks of unpaid leave — and even that comes with eligibility rules that shut out a large share of workers. Only around a quarter of private-sector workers in the U.S. currently have access to any paid family leave at all, and access is heavily stratified by income: workers in management and professional roles are far more likely to have paid leave than those in service, production, or transportation jobs.
The consequences aren't abstract. Research links the absence of paid family leave to higher rates of postpartum depression, while access to paid leave is associated with better maternal mental health, lower rates of infant re-hospitalization, and reduced infant mortality. In other words: this isn't a "nice-to-have" benefit. It's a public health issue that we've chosen, as a country, to leave largely unresolved.
Equality on Paper Isn't Equality in Practice
The 19th Amendment was a genuine, hard-won victory — one that (imperfectly, and initially excluding many women of color in practice) opened a door. But the right to vote was never the finish line. It was supposed to be the starting point for a fuller kind of equality: economic security, bodily safety, and a workplace and healthcare system that doesn't quietly penalize women for having families.
We haven't gotten there yet. Mothers are still paid less for the same work, still dying in childbirth at rates our peer nations would find unacceptable, and still sent back to work without the paid time to heal that most of the developed world takes for granted.
What This Day Should Actually Be For
Women's Equality Day shouldn't just be a commemoration — it should be a checkpoint. A moment to ask, honestly: who still isn't equal, and why? For mothers in particular, the data makes the answer uncomfortable to acknowledge, but ignoring it doesn't make it less true.
Progress is real. The 19th Amendment mattered, and so does every gain since. But equality isn't something we finished in 1920 — it's something we're still building, one policy, one workplace, and one honest conversation at a time.
Sources include the U.S. Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Pew Research Center, the Commonwealth Fund, and the Institute for Women's Policy Research.
Written by: A woman by the name of Lital Diament