As more women become family breadwinners during this financial downturn, equal pay is not simply a matter of fairness; it’s increasingly an issue of economic survival. Yesterday was Equal Pay Day. Once again, there’s a significant gap between what employers pay women and men for comparable work. On average, women earn just 78 percent of what men earn. In workplace terms, this means that the typical woman must work from January 2008 through April 2009 to earn what her male counterpart received in 2008 alone. And it’s even worse for women of color. Furthermore, AAUW’s new state-by-state comparison of wages found gross pay inequities across the board—for college graduates as well as for the general workforce.

When the morning “bye, honey” hug has the wife heading out to work and the husband staying at home because he’s been laid off, the gap in pay between women and men becomes a family issue. If the wife had been laid off instead, the family income likely would have taken a smaller hit, because women in the U.S. still earn only 78 cents for every dollar that men earn. In Virginia, women average 77 percent of what men earn.