Last week, Emma Watson, the UN Women Goodwill Ambassador better known as Hermione from Harry Potter, delivered a speech to the delegates gathered in New York championing feminism and pledging to end gender inequality. Big task! Her campaign will tackle, among other things, the fact that women are paid so much less than men, even in countries like the United States and the U.K., where we are allegedly no longer discriminated against. (As if to illustrate the rampant sexism that still exists, hackers threatened to release nude photos of her after her speech.)

In tackling this issue, Watson is, whether she knows it or not, also implicitly taking on a broader issue. While most people never make this connection, it’s a fact that gender inequality is a big driver of income inequality. Women are paid less than men overall—78 cents to their male counterparts’ dollar according to a survey this year, which is a whole penny more than it was for the past decade!—and mothers are paid even less. Black women and Latinas are heavily discriminated against in the workplace, making only 64 and 56 cents for every dollar, respectively, paid to white men. Black and Latina mothers bring home more than half of their families’ income, and female-headed houses are the most likely to be poor. If we made an effort to pay women more fairly, we’d go a long way toward raising the wages of most of America’s low-income families.

If you asked conservatives in this country, however, they would claim no such inequality exists. It’s one of the reasons the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill that would close some of the legal loopholes allowing companies to pay their female employees less, is still stuck in the Senate. Republicans blocked it, for the second time, from coming up to a vote earlier this month. Every single Republican who showed up to vote, including the party’s three women, voted against.