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Source: Ariel Skelley / Getty

While Black women are some of the hardest working people on the planet, we do not make an equal wage for equal work. This is why August 22 has been deemed #BlackWomenEqualPayDay.

According to the Atlanta Women for Equality (AME), African-American women make $0.61 for every dollar earned by White men. Even worse? More than 70 percent of Black women are either the sole breadwinners or the primary earner in their families.

So to cheat us out of our wages directly impacts our families and can keep us in poverty.

 

But a new study tells an even more grim tale of what lost wages looks like in our lives.

According to a study released this month by the National Women’s Law Center, over the course of a 40-year career, that totals $946,120, nearly a million dollars!

Just think how different our lives would look like with that type of money.

Jasmine Tucker, director of research at the National Women’s Law Center, told the HuffPost that is number is “unfathomable.”

It’s like “losing out on the American dream,” Tucker said. “A million dollars is child care, it’s health care, it’s a house, it’s economic stability. And that’s just straight earnings.”

But Tucker believes that we are the force to make a serious change.

“I think that the sort of interesting thing is that Black women are gaining political power right now. Black women are gonna continue to drive the movement forward and they’re gonna continue because they’re the one pushing this forward and there’s a mismatch between their growing political power and [them] falling behind terms of economic security and family security,” she stressed.

Of course, Black women took to Twitter to raise awareness around the hashtag and to demand that we get paid what we DESERVE:

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