Liz Watson, Senior Counsel

Liz Watson, Senior Advisor

Liz Watson is Senior Counsel to the Education and Employment Team at the National Women’s Law Center. In her work on the Education and Employment Team, Liz uses legislative advocacy, public education and litigation to promote full and fair opportunities for women and girls in employment and job training. She also works on cross-cutting projects at the Center that advance the interests of women and girls. Before coming to the Center, Liz was Executive Director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy where she led public policy initiatives focused on improving policies and programs that address the needs of low-income workers and marginalized girls and young women. Prior to that, she was legislative counsel for Workplace Flexibility 2010 at Georgetown Law, where much of her work focused on developing policy solutions to work-family conflict and its consequences for low-wage workers. She also practiced employment law at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. Liz began her career as a Skadden Public Interest Law Fellow, working with low-wage workers and women receiving public benefits in New York City. She served as a law clerk to the Honorable Susan Y. Illston of the Northern District of California. Liz is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and Carleton College.

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My Take

Poverty and the Wage Gap Both Hurt Women and Families

Posted by
Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst
Liz Watson, Senior Counsel
| Posted on: September 18, 2013 at 02:32 pm
56 percent of poor children live in families headed by women.

Census Bureau data released yesterday show that women continue to experience high rates of poverty and a nasty wage gap.

In 2012, the poverty rate for women was 14.5 percent, substantially higher than men’s rate of 11 percent. Nearly 17.8 million women lived in poverty last year.

Poverty rates were particularly high for families headed by single mothers – more than four in ten (40.9 percent) were poor. More than half (56.1 percent) of poor children lived in female-headed families in 2012.

The poverty rates for other vulnerable groups of women were also high: black women (25.1 percent), Hispanic women (24.8 percent), and women 65 and older living alone (18.9 percent).

The wage gap figures also paint a bleak picture for many women.

The cold hard facts are that women working full time, year round continue to be paid only 77 cents for every dollar paid to their male counterparts, and the numbers are far worse for women of color, at 64 cents for black women and 54 cents for Hispanic women.

With women as primary breadwinners in over 40% of families today, women and their families simply cannot afford to make do with less.

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Tags: Census Bureau and Census Data, Employment, Poverty, Wage Gap, Equal Pay and the Wage Gap, Data on Poverty & Income, Employment, Poverty & Income Support | Add new comment

THIS JUST IN: Women and Families Face a 23-Cent Wage Gap Again This Year

Posted by
Beccah Golubock Watson, Fellow
Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst
Liz Watson, Senior Counsel
| Posted on: September 17, 2013 at 04:29 pm

77 cents on the dollar – does that have a familiar ring to you? You guessed it—it’s the amount that women working full time, year round typically made for every dollar that men made in 2012. It’s now been more than a decade with no progress on narrowing the wage gap. That means that American women have been working for over a decade without seeing the wage gap diminish. The wage gap typically cost women $11,608 in 2012. Based on the 2012 wage gap, over the course of a 40-year career a woman would lose $464,300.

The wage gap is even worse for women of color:

  • In 2012, African-American women working full time, year round were typically paid only 64 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men.
  • Hispanic women working full time, year round were typically paid only 54 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men.
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Tags: Census Bureau and Census Data, Employment, Equal Pay, Wage Gap, Equal Pay and the Wage Gap, Employment | Add new comment

New Rule Brings Home Care Workers One Giant Step Closer to Fair Pay

Posted by Liz Watson, Senior Counsel | Posted on: September 17, 2013 at 01:57 pm

Because of a new rule out today from the Department of Labor, home care workers will no longer be left out of the basic wage and hour protections guaranteed by the FLSA. Today’s rule extends wage and hour protections to all direct care workers employed by home care agencies and other third parties. This is excellent news, and it’s about time!

The exclusion of home care workers from the FLSA is emblematic of all that is wrong with the way our society values (or doesn’t value) women’s work. This 90% female workforce does vitally important work for their clients, such as bathing, clothing, and administering medication. Yet, this work – like work in many female-dominated jobs – is among the most poorest paid. Home care workers typically earn below $10 an hour.

In 1975, only one year after Congress extended the FLSA’s protections to domestic workers employed by individual households, the Department of Labor took these protections away from home care workers through an expansive reading of the “companionship” exemption. This interpretation was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007, and home care workers and their advocates have been clamoring for the rule released today ever since.

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Tags: Department of Labor, Employment, Equal Pay, Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), Wage Gap, Equal Pay and the Wage Gap, Employment | Add new comment

The Story Behind the Numbers: The Wage Gap

Posted by
Beccah Golubock Watson, Fellow
Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst
Liz Watson, Senior Counsel
| Posted on: September 16, 2013 at 10:48 am

Tomorrow, the Census Bureau will release new data on poverty, income, and health insurance in the U.S. in 2012. As we get ready to crunch numbers, we thought it would be helpful to take a deeper look at what these numbers tell us – and don’t tell us – about the wage gap.

The typical American woman who works full time, year round was still paid only 77 cents for every dollar paid to her male counterpart in 2011. For women of color, the gaps are even larger. This blog post provides details about the wage gap measure that the Census Bureau and the National Women’s Law Center use, factors contributing to the wage gap, and how to shrink the gap.

What’s behind NWLC’s wage gap figure?

The wage gap figure that NWLC reports at the national level is the same as that reported by the Census Bureau – the median earnings of women full-time, year-round workers as a percentage of the median earnings of men full-time, year-round workers. Median earnings describe the earnings of a worker at the 50th percentile – right in the middle. Earnings include wages, salary, net self-employment income but not property income, government cash transfers or other cash income – so basically the money people see in their paychecks. Working full time is defined as working at least 35 hours a week and working year round means working at least 50 weeks during the last twelve months.

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Tags: Census Bureau and Census Data, Employment, Wage Gap, Equal Pay and the Wage Gap, Employment | Add new comment

New Jersey Outlaws Employer Crackdowns on Workers Who Discuss Their Pay

Posted by
Lauren Khouri, Fellow
Liz Watson, Senior Counsel
| Posted on: September 05, 2013 at 02:25 pm

It’s been fifty years since the Equal Pay Act of 1963 made clear that women should receive equal pay for equal work, but women are still paid less than men in nearly every occupation.

And because employee salaries are often kept secret, it is difficult for women to find out when they are being paid less than their male colleagues, and therefore difficult to challenge pay discrepancies. In fact, over 61 percent of private-sector employees report that discussing wages is either prohibited or discouraged by their employers. Employer policies and practices that prevent workers from discussing their pay mean that a woman worker could be paid less year after year than the man across the hall doing her same job and never know it.

One week ago today, New Jersey took a huge step toward solving this problem when Chris Christie signed into law a bill prohibiting retaliation against employees who disclose salary information for the purpose of investigating whether pay decisions are being made unfairly. Effective immediately, the new law prohibits employer retaliation against employees for discussing information such as job title, occupational category, rate of compensation, and employee benefits.

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Tags: Equal Pay, Equal Pay Act, New Jersey, Pay Secrecy, Equal Pay and the Wage Gap, Employment | 1 comment