Next "Equal Occupational Fatality Day" in 2021

Yesterday was Equal Pay Day, which supposedly represents how far into 2012 the average woman has to work to make the same pay that the average man earned in 2011. The National Committee on Pay Equity started Equal Pay Day in 1996 as “a public awareness event to illustrate the gap between men’s and women’s wages.”

In 2010, I created “Equal Occupational Fatality Day” on the Enterprise Blog and started an annual tradition:

Inspired by Equal Pay Day, and in recognition of the significant gender differences in workplace deaths, let me propose the creation of “Equal Occupational Fatality Day.” That date symbolizes how long women will have to work before they experience the same loss of life from work-related deaths that men experienced in a given year. Because most women work in much safer occupations than men, they must work longer than men to experience the same number of occupational fatalities.  Equal Occupational Fatality Day is being originated to illustrate the gap between men’s and women’s occupational deaths, and bring awareness to the fact that closing the pay gap would also close the work-related death gap and expose thousands of women to occupational fatalities each year.

Now that another year has passed, and with new data on occupational fatalities from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I hereby declare that the next “Equal Occupational Fatality Day” will occur on October 11, 2021. In 2010 (the most recent year available), 4,192 men died from fatal injuries while working compared to only 355 women (see chart below), so that women would have to work for almost the next decade to experience the same loss of life on the job as men in just one year.

Read more here at The Enterprise Blog.