Transcript: Mayor Adams Delivers Remarks At 18th Annual Equal Pay Day Rally

March 12, 2024

Mayor Eric Adams: Thank you so much, Madam President. And I am going to speak less so women can be paid more.

This is a women's rally, and I'm not going to get in the way. This is not new for me. And you know, I can recall Mommy making her way home from Amistad Day Care Center as a food service worker and a shop steward, not making enough to provide for my five siblings and me.

I recall my sister, frustrated after years working in the bank doing the work and having her white supervisor having all the benefits and watching young people come in and going over her over and over again. That frustration was real, and that frustration is not only economically impactful on you.

Trust me when I tell you when you're working more getting less that's an emotional toll on you as well. It leads to some of the physical ailments that you have, because what impacts you emotionally impacts you physically as well. And so, years of years of this abuse, trust me it's connected to some of the healthcare crises that we are facing, and we often ignore that.

And this is not my first journey. This is not my first time at the rodeo. When the Public Advocate James did a study on how we are paying women in the workplace, she found that my office as a Brooklyn Borough President, I was paying women 14 percent higher than men back then.

So, when I came here to City Hall and talked about a woman's agenda, who am I to sit down and write that agenda? I went to my five deputy mayors— who are women— and said, create that agenda for me. Tell me what we need to do with our Women Forward agenda, how do we decrease the cost of childcare, how do we make sure we have a real healthcare system?

Because it's more than equality in pay; it's an equality in every sector of our society that inequality exists, folks. Don't get it wrong. There was a major study done once where they took a musician in an orchestra and they no longer look at the visualization of the person that's playing, they put them behind the curtain so that we can have an unbiased approach on who you're going to pick to play the instrument. When they couldn't see that it was a man or a woman, there was a higher proportion of women being chosen.

We come [up] with biases. We look at the description of people in front of us, and we believe they're qualified based on their gender and ethnicity, not based on their quality and what they produce. That's what we want to change. That's why this is so important. That's why six mayors later, you have a man here who's part of and the president of the men who gets the club.

I'm the president of that club. I get it, it's so important, and we're seeing it. You hear it from the lead speaker as she talks about the women agenda over and over again. You hear it from our attorney general. You hear it all across.

This is the time if we're ever going to dismantle the unfairness of what we are doing not only in government but in the private industry, this is the window of opportunity. We're not going backwards. We are going to make it happen, and I'm proud to be a member of that club, Men Who Get It. Thank you guys.