Silicon Valley event calls attention to Latina employee pay gap
SANTA CLARA -- Maria Castellon is the president and CEO of Bench-Tek, a multi-million-dollar Santa Clara factory that makes benches, racks and workstations for tech, bio-med and car companies in Silicon Valley and around the world.
When she walks into business meetings, she sometimes gets mistaken for someone else.
"No matter how I was dressed, they automatically thought I was looking for a job," Castellon says.
Castellon has battled stereotyping, discrimination and wage theft on her long road to success as one of the few Latina CEOs in manufacturing.
That's why she opened her factory and added her voice to a rally on Latina Equal Pay Day Thursday.
"We can create our own future. We can create financial wealth," Castellon said.
The rally was organized by the Latina Coalition of Silicon Valley and the Santa Clara County Office of Women's Policy to draw attention to studies which show Latinas earn an average of 42 cents to every dollar earned by White males in California.
"It could be racism, misogyny, patriarchy, capitalism -- there's a lot of 'isms,'" said Gabby Chavez-Lopez, the Latina Coalition's executive director.
"The real kicker is that as a woman excels in her career, advances and becomes more educated, the pay gap will only widen for her, which is counterintuitive," Chavez-Lopez said.
Castellon said she first felt the sting of injustice when she worked as a janitor for a tech company and was skipped over for raises.
"I felt invisible. I was one more number," she remembers.
She went back to school, learned the tech furniture business while working in someone else's factory and saved her money.
"I had two jobs in the week and a part-time job on Saturday to help support my brothers after my mom died," Castellon said.
Castellon started her own company after being laid off in the 2002 dot-com bust.
Now, she has 27 employees and owns the factory and the ground it sits on and her experiences dictate how she treats her employees.
"I don't want my team to go through what I went through -- not having health insurance, not having any type of retirement plan. So, I'm fulfilled that my employees are contributing to that dream that I had," she said.