Black Mothers Get Underpaid Twice: Once At Work, Once At Tax Time

By Taylor Austin, Campaign Director, Workplace Justice, MomsRising

Black Women’s Equal Pay Day is on July 21 this year. It is the day we use to highlight the racist and sexist wage gap faced by Black women. Black women are paid 65 cents for every dollar paid to non-Hispanic white men working full-time, year-round.

I lead on workplace justice campaigns, so I want to be precise about something. The 65-cent figure everyone will quote next week does not come from nowhere. It gets built, job by job, in American workplaces. Then the federal tax code picks it up and charges Black mothers a second time for it.

Where the number gets made …

Black women working full time, year-round were paid 65 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men in 2024, down from 66 cents in 2023 and 69 cents in 2022. The gap widened for a second consecutive year, the first time that has happened since the government began collecting the data in 1960. That gap is built three ways.

It is built by sorting. More than half of Black women work in occupations where they are overrepresented, and those occupations pay lower median wages. Black women are concentrated in childcare, home care, and housekeeping, and largely locked out of higher-paying fields. They are 6.1% of the workforce and 9.2% of the low-paid workforce. It is built inside the same job title. Black women working full time as cashiers and retail salespeople, their second most common occupation, are paid 55 cents for every dollar paid to a white, non-Hispanic man doing that work. In nursing and teaching, the best-paying of their 10 most common jobs, they are still paid about 20% less.
And it is built by silence. Nearly 60% of private-sector workers report that discussing wages is prohibited or discouraged by their employer, even though the National Labor Relations Act makes forbidding those conversations illegal. A gap you are not allowed to discuss is a gap you cannot contest.

For Black mothers, it lands harder: about 52 cents for every dollar paid to a white father.

Then the tax code reads the paycheck…

Here is the part nobody mentions on July 21: The Child Tax Credit is worth up to $2,200 per child. Most of that only helps a family that owes enough federal income tax to absorb it. For families who don’t, the refundable portion is capped at $1,700 per child, and you reach that ceiling by climbing a ramp: you must earn at least $2,500 to get anything, and from there the credit grows by fifteen cents for every additional dollar you earn.

Read that again—the credit phases in with your wages. The less you are paid, the less of it you get. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy ran the arithmetic. A family with three children earning $30,000 receives $4,125 rather than the $6,600 available to higher-income families.

Last July’s reconciliation law raised the maximum credit to $2,200 per child and made it permanent, which produced a round of press releases about supporting families. The structure underneath went untouched. The earnings floor stayed. The phase-in stayed. The cap stayed. An estimated 19 million children will receive less than the full credit this year, or none at all, because their families earn too little. Half of all Black children are in that group. Not because their parents don’t work. Because their parents’ work is underpaid, and the credit was built to reward the paycheck rather than the child.

So the workplace hands a Black mother a discounted paycheck. The tax code reads that paycheck, decides she must not need much, and discounts her child’s credit to match. An earnings test, applied in a labor market that pays Black women 65 cents on the dollar, is not a neutral measure of effort. It is a discrimination test wearing a better suit.

Fix it at both ends.

This design was a choice, and other lawmakers keep making the opposite one. Eleven of the 15 states with their own child tax credits made theirs fully refundable. The American Family Act would do the same federally, ending the rule that denies a child the full credit because her mother earns too little. But full refundability only stops the compounding. It does not fix the wage that started it. That takes workplace policy, and the list is not mysterious. Pay range transparency, so a Black woman can see what a job pays before she is lowballed into it. Salary history bans, so one employer’s discrimination stops following her to the next job. Real enforcement of the right to discuss wages, which workers already have on paper and are told to forget in practice. Paid family and medical leave, so becoming a mother stops functioning as a permanent pay cut. Childcare funding, so a low-wage job does not cost more than it returns.

MomsRising brought mothers to Capitol Hill this spring for the first mom-centered congressional hearing on affordability. They testified about groceries, rent, and childcare. A typical family now needs roughly $145,000 a year to get by. Set that against a mother earning half of a white father’s dollar and then losing part of her child’s credit because of it, and the arithmetic stops being abstract. It becomes a decision about which bill goes unpaid this month.

Black women have never needed this country’s awareness. We get it every July, on a date that drifts a little each year and gets covered like weather.

What we need is a workplace that pays a Black mother what her work is worth, and a tax code that stops treating her underpayment as her own verdict on herself. She earned the full credit. Her child certainly did.

About the author

Taylor is the campaign director for MomsRising’s Workplace Justice Campaigns. Her professional background is rooted in reproductive healthcare and advocacy, protecting reproductive rights through grassroots organizing, public education, and legislative change within Pennsylvania.

With a deep commitment to the belief that social health directly impacts physical wellbeing, Taylor holds a Bachelor’s degree in Public Health (with a Biology minor) from Temple University, as well as a Master of Science in Health Administration (MHA) from Saint Joseph’s University. As a Black woman living in the United States, she is grateful to be able to leverage both her lived and professional experiences to advocate for and positively impact women and families.

A proud Philadelphia transplant, Taylor now resides in the Philadelphia suburbs with her husband, their two children, and an ever-growing collection of plant babies.