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It's going to take an army of young women to reverse decades of wage inequality in Utah and elsewhere, says Susan Sparrow, a former Utahn honored this week for her activism as a high school student in 2003.
The New York Times website on women's issues named Sparrow one of 11 people who were critical to the equal-pay movement, putting her in such company as her hero, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin.
Sparrow, 29, now teaches world history to eighth-graders at Charles Wright Academy, a small private school in Tacoma, Wash.
But 12 years ago, she was a junior at Rowland Hall and led a group of 22 students who lobbied the Legislature to study pay inequality among state employees.
The students were successful, and a study that year found big inequities between the pay for men and women. But there was no money to close the gap that year or the next, and Sparrow graduated and headed to Pomona College in California.
"Our government is not willing to spend the money to bring women where they ought to be," Sparrow said in a phone interview. "When you look at the country and Utah, it is not something people … want to take on."
The New York Times piece coincided with Equal Pay Day on Tuesday, the day chosen by a coalition of women's, civil-rights and labor groups to denote how much longer women must work each year to earn what men earned in the previous year.
Utah has the fourth-widest pay gap in the U.S., according to an analysis by the National Partnership for Women & Families. Only Louisiana, Wyoming and West Virginia have wider pay gaps.
In Utah, women working full time earn 70 cents for every $1 earned by men working full time. Nationally, the gap is narrower, with women earning 78 cents for every dollar earned by a man.
The gap is closing, but at such a slow rate that Sparrow figures the students she's teaching now will still have to deal with wage inequality.
"I look at my students and say, 'By the time you're in the workforce, you will be the most educated in history, and yet you will still make less than men," she said. "Our system still is not set up for them."
Sparrow says she brings the issue into the classroom as her students consider income differences in the developing world. "I want them to care about income inequality globally," she said.
The teacher was thrilled to learn that pay inequality remains a cause for some Utah high school students, including the Young Democrats club at Jordan High School in Sandy. In March, the group had a two-day gender-equality bake sale, charging boys $1 for cookies and girls just 77 cents.
Sparrow's group also used cookies, but Capitol rules forbade selling them, so the 2003 activists gave away cookies — bigger ones to represent men's pay and smaller ones to represent women's pay.
Every day, she and others in the group would spend at least an hour at the Capitol, coaxing lawmakers to study the issue. "We just came and flooded the upper hallways," she recalls.
Sparrow calls the recognition she received this week "really cool and undeserved and crazy.
"It definitely was not just me," she added. "It was a huge group of girls — and boys — that went."
She believes it will take a long-term effort by many young women — and a full-time lobbyist — to reverse the pay gap.
"It's an issue that needs a full-time champion," Sparrow said. "At the rate we're going, it won't be until 2100-something that we make the same wage. That's ridiculous."
Twitter: @KristenMoulton