You Owe Me 20 Cents

Womxn 2 Womxn: A Gender Leadership Podcast

In this week's episode we're talking about money! Equal pay! We learned about the reality of the gender wage gap for women of color. We had the opportunity to chat with Dr. Gloria Thomas, Director of the Carolina Women's Center.

Guest Bio

Dr. Gloria D. Thomas joined the Carolina Women’s Center as director on August 1, 2016. Before then, she served as director of the Center for the Education of Women (CEW) at the University of Michigan for 7 ½ years, where she led the Center in broadening the focus of CEW’s constituency from primarily adult women to women and nontraditional students with a particular focus on students who are underserved at U-M. Under her leadership there, CEW received a grant from the Ford Foundation of more than $380,000 for the Michigan Partners Project aimed at advancing economic security and mobility for Michigan women living in poverty, particularly women of color in Detroit and Flint.

Prior to returning to CEW, Dr. Thomas served in two associate director positions at the American Council on Education (ACE) from 2000-2008, including in the Office of Women in Higher Education, and in the ACE Fellows Program, both where the foci of her professional duties were leadership development and enhancing career success for women in academe. Before ACE, from 1995 – 1999, she worked at CEW during doctoral studies, conducting research and coordinating the Women of Color in the Academy Project, a support network for women of color faculty.

After graduating from college, Dr. Thomas rose to the rank of associate dean of admissions and director of minority student recruitment at Swarthmore College, her alma mater, where she earned a B.A. in English and Black studies from Swarthmore College, an M.A. in English from Villanova University, and a Ph.D. in higher education from the University of Michigan.

Additional Resources

AAUW's The Simple Truth about the Gender Pay Gap

The Wage Gap for Women of Color Widened in 2017

Reminder: Today Isn't Equal Pay Day for Black, Latina or Native American Women

Multicultural Women at Work: The Working Mother Report

This podcast is a creation of the Womxn of Worth Initiative at UNC-Chapel Hill with support from the American Association for University Women (AAUW). This podcast features the song “mountaintops in the sky” by Artificial.Music, available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.