Sex Discrimination in the Workplace Persists, Despite iPhones

Yo, how hysterical is the Internet?  Have you seen the photo with the “Brick” iPhone case?

One of the reasons those memes are so funny is because they often depict people from another time - a period in history so many of us are familiar with only through a series of distant  images and associations drawn from movies, attic magazines, older relatives and our favorite substitute teachers. But THEN memes show these historical figures saying things exactly the way we would today!  LOL!  The Internet is so crazy!  It’s too much!

Except when it’s not.  In the case of fair pay, the irony is unfortunately too real.  Many of us think of sex discrimination as something that happened in the old days when women wore watches and talked on phones with cords, (Ok, ok, yes, we still do that today and maybe that woman is not actually from the ‘80s, but with fashions coming back these days, it’s hard to tell, and you get the point.).  Yet it’s still happening today, even in the age of iPhones and Blackberrys.

Here at the National Women’s Law Center, I routinely speak to working women whose careers have suffered, simply because they are women.  I’ve heard from women who were paid less than men while doing the same job, women who were retaliated against after reporting sexual harassment, and women who were denied employment opportunities only because they weren’t men.

Sex discrimination has been a constant in the history of women in the workforce and the battle is far from over.  Today, the Senate has an opportunity to address this issue and vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act.  The PFA incentivizes employers to treat women fairly and provides women with the tools they need to address wage discrimination.

I hope that wage discrimination will be a distant memory for the sons and daughters of my generation, along with watches and phones with cords.