feminism is ...

... the radical notion that women are people.

(anonymous)

OK, first the bad news: Two days ago, April 22nd, was Equal Pay Day (as well as Earth Day ... is it pure coincidence Mother Nature is its mascot?), the day when U.S. women's average earnings finally catch up with the amount men earned on average in 2007. In other words, we're paid so much less than our male counterparts that we had to work an extra 113 days just to match their earning power from last year.

In 1966, women who worked full-time, year-round were paid an average of only 58 cents for every dollar paid to men. Currently, women are paid 77 cents per the average man's dollar — a less-than-20-cent improvement over more than 40 years, and a number which seems to have hit an invisible wall since about the mid-90s.

OK, now a little bit better news: Though women are still outrageously underpaid and severely underrepresented within our government, we're still marking plenty of political milestones, from both sides of the aisle. Just since 2005:

Dr. Condoleezza Rice became the first Republican woman and the first African-American woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State.

Washington state became the first state to have both a woman governor (Christine Gregoire-D) and two women serving in the U.S. Senate (Patty Murray-D and Maria Cantwell-D).

U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) became the first woman to serve as Speaker of the U.S. House.

Three U.S. congresswomen became the first women of color to chair congressional committees: Representative Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-CA), Committee on House Administration; Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH), Committee on Ethics; and Representative Nydia Velasquez (D-NY), Committee on Small Business.

U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) became the first woman to win a major party's presidential primary for the purposes of delegate selection — in New Hampshire on January 8th.

So we've got some serious leadership happening; now maybe if we can get more women into more positions of political power, we can begin to knock through that irritating invisible wall keeping us from making the money we deserve.