Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Women’s Equal Pay Day
august 28, 2025
61 cents for “all earners” (full-time year-round + part-time and part-year)
65 cents for full-time, year-round earners
August 28, 2025 is Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) Women’s Equal Pay Day. Equal Pay Today and partners will host a social media storm on August 28 at 2pm ET/11am PT to raise awareness of how NHPI women experience wage gaps and the impact on communities.
For every dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men working full time, year-round in 2023, NHPI women, working full time, year-round only were paid 65 cents. But when looking at all NHPI women earners (full-time, part-time, and part-year/seasonal), they bring home a mere 61 cents for every dollar earned by their white, non-Hispanic male counterparts. However, for some communities, the pay disparities are even worse. The biggest wage gaps experienced by NHPI women are hidden in data that aggregates all AANHPI people together. When each of our populations is represented statistically, a more complex truth emerges. Each NHPI ethnicity subgroup needs to be represented in data collected by government agencies.
Unfortunately, the current Administration has taken executive actions that have undermined efforts to disaggregate data, which include: eliminating the White House Initiative on Asian American, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (WHIAANHPI), removing federal datasets at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and other agencies, and the disbanding of the Federal Equitable Data Working Group and key Census Bureau advisory committees. Such entities and tools serve as critical points of access for us to find the proper solutions and resources to support our communities. It only exacerbates the wage gap and makes it harder to address the economic challenges NHPI women face.
Ultimately, pay gaps can only be addressed if we have full information on how it impacts all NHPI communities, as well as having comprehensive pay equity policies that would help break harmful patterns of pay discrimination and maintain workplace protections for all NHPI women.
This year, the NHPI Women’s EPD social media storm call to action will be urging the Department of Labor and other federal agencies to collect, analyze, and share public disaggregated information about the NHPI community. We also are urging Congress to conduct oversight on agencies that provide worker protections to help reduce these egregious pay disparities and to provide opportunities and resources that will support NHPI women in building a path towards economic security.
For the social media storm, please use the toolkit created by Empowering Pacific Islander Communities (EPIC). Our shared hashtag for the day will be #NHPIWomensEqualPayDay.
We hope to see you online for the social media storm to recognize this day and the work that remains to be done.
NHPI Women’s Equal Pay Day co-leads,
EPIC & EPT/Equal Rights Advocates
