YWCA Greater Green Bay transforms Jackson Park into giant 'equity' board game as part of Stand Against Racism event
Natalie Eilbert
GREEN BAY - The game piece you might choose at this Green Bay YWCA event depicts a 52-year-old Indigenous woman with no children who took time off from her career to pursue a PhD.
After returning to her profession as an executive in the finance and insurance industry, the character featured in this game earns 71 cents for every dollar earned by a white man.
Except, it isn't really a game. Her salary was calculated using reports from the 2022 State of the Gender Pay Gap Report and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The "Game of Equity" is one activity in the four-day signature event called Stand Against Racism, organized by YWCA Greater Green Bay. The event at Jackson Park started Thursday and continues through Sunday.
Depending on the piece you play, the game invites you to imagine what life could be like as a 27-year-old white woman with a young child and a bachelor's degree, a 36-year-old Hispanic woman without children and a master's degree in business, the aforementioned Indigenous woman, or a 40-year-old Black woman with two children and a master's degree.
Their circumstances change the outcome of their wages, explained Amy Schaeuble, executive director of YWCA Greater Green Bay, depending on whether they're a mother, if they took time away from work, their age and their race or ethnicity.
"By having us choose different demographics, to see what other women are going through, and compare it to our experience or our own demographics, it made me realize how I was experiencing this myself," said Erin Rovinski, 31, who participated in Thursday's event. "And I didn't know that other women were also experiencing this."
The human-sized board game uses QR codes on signs across Jackson Park. The event also includes webinars featuring keynote speakers such as Martin Luther King Jr.'s daughter Bernice King, intended to teach people about wage gaps and professional inequities and offer action items such as signing the Stand Against Racism pledge and writing to Sen. Patty Murray to demonstrate support for The Child Care for Working Families Act.
"We really just want people to engage in the work because not everyone knows how to engage, right? It's important, they know it's important, but how do they do that?" Schaeuble said. "Just doing something simple like these action items … can make big differences."
Schaeuble highlighted the nation's child care crisis as critical in whether women are empowered in their professions. YWCA Greater Green Bay has only about 15 child care providers on staff who currently serve around 60 children, when the nonprofit is licensed to care for over 100 children.
The pandemic's hold over the last two years created major attrition rates for child care providers. To help with retaining those who remain, Schaeuble established mental health days for staff to alleviate everyday stressors and burnout.
"Families need care and we want to support the economic advancement of women," Schaeuble said. "If we don't have care for our children, women have to choose if they work, if they go to school, if they stay home. There's a lot of different things facing women and especially women of color right here in Green Bay."
Choice was on Laura Schley's mind while she was taking part in the Game of Equity. She said she shouldn't have to think about whether having children will hurt her career.
"This has been an eye-opening journey. Women, more than men, have to think about what the choice of having kids will do for their careers," Schley, 29, said. "It should be as simple as 'Yeah, I want to have kids. I want to take some time off to focus on parenting or family.' That shouldn't be a career-altering choice of your gender or your ethnicity."
The "Mother Penalty," one of the QR codes in the park, demonstrates what impact motherhood has on wage gaps. While women with a bachelor's degree make 82 cents for each dollar men make, a mother makes an average of 74 cents for each dollar men make.
"To put that in other terms, that is over 90,000 diapers in lost wages per year," according to the YWCA Greater Green Bay website.
Throughout the four days of events, YWCA Greater Green Bay hired women-owned food trucks to feed staff and participants. Thursday's food truck, Blue Suede Foods, makes everything from Philly cheesesteaks to Cuban sandwiches.
Chef and owner Rachelle O'Donnell-Lance said that, before she got her food truck, she worked in the restaurant industry for six years trying to get ahead as a sous-chef. She said that men with less experience and training would walk in and get hired for positions she was told she wasn't ready for.
"It was a good ol' boys club and was very prevalent at a few of the companies I worked for," O'Donnell-Lance said. "When I was a sous-chef, I made less than $40,000. Other men in my position were making closer to $50,000. We compared notes."
Across backgrounds and industries, YWCA Greater Green Bay sees events like the 2022 Stand Against Racism as an opportunity not only for awareness, but action. Men, Schaeuble said, play an important role, too.
"We want men to get the same thing as women out of this: awareness, education, advocacy. Strong men empower women," Schaeuble said. "I hope men understand and want to be part of that change. That's what we're hoping for."
Natalie Eilbert is a government watchdog reporter for the Green Bay Press-Gazette. You can reach her at neilbert@gannett.com or view her Twitter profile at @natalie_eilbert.