Liz Watson, Senior Advisor

Liz Watson, Senior Advisor

Liz Watson is Senior Advisor 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

If I Had A Hammer, I’d Hammer Out Occupational Segregation

Posted by Liz Watson, Senior Advisor | Posted on: April 29, 2013 at 11:36 am

When I was a teenager road constructions signs around my town read: “MEN WORKING.” I wrote our local newspaper outraged about the message that sends to women and girls: good-paying construction jobs are not jobs for women. Friends told me not to worry – those signs weren’t such a big deal. But the hard truth is that occupational segregation is very bad for women.

Those “MEN WORKING” signs remain a pretty darn accurate reflection of who actually works in construction. In fact, women made up the same measly percentage of workers in construction trades and related occupations in 2010 that they did in 1983 – 2.6%!

Throughout the labor market women are clustered in jobs that are primarily done by women, many of which pay low wages. Nearly 40% of women work in occupations that are at least 75% female, and women make up the majority of workers in the 10 largest occupations that pay under $10 an hour. According to the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR), progress in the 70s and 80s toward integrating occupations stalled out in the mid-90s. 

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Tags: Employment, Women in the Workplace, Employment | Add new comment

The Working Families Flexibility Act: Nothing But Empty Promises

Posted by
Catherine Yourougou, Fellow
Liz Watson, Senior Advisor
| Posted on: April 25, 2013 at 02:52 pm

Last week we submitted comments in opposition to The Working Families Flexibility Act, the “comp time in lieu of overtime” bill that went to the House Education and the Workforce Committee’s Subcommittee on Workforce Protections for a markup last Wednesday. And now we can’t get the song “Promises, Promises” out of our heads.



You made me promises, promises
You knew you'd never keep
Promises, promises
Why do I believe?

The Working Families Flexibility Act is filled with empty promises. Instead of providing flexibility, it would take hard-earned overtime pay out of workers’ pockets in exchange for the elusive promise of compensatory time off. While the bill’s supporters claim that there is nothing coercive about offering a comp time alternative to overtime pay, they do so against a backdrop of rampant violations of low-wage workers’ rights to overtime. In a study of low-wage workers in major cities, 76% said they worked overtime without being paid time and one-half.  It is a safe bet that enacting a comp time law would give rise to a whole new category of wage and hour abuses. 

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Tags: Employment, House of Representatives, Women in the Workplace, Pregnancy, Parenting, and the Workplace, Employment | Add new comment

An Equal Pay Day Message You Can Dance To

Posted by Liz Watson, Senior Advisor | Posted on: April 09, 2013 at 02:33 pm

It's Equal Pay Day -- the day in the year when women's wages finally catch up to men's from the previous year. For the occasion, NWLC has released a number of new fact sheets explaining the persistent wage gap and its impact on women and families. You'll see that today women still make $.77 for every dollar the typical man makes. There are lots of reasons we need to close the wage gap. Among the most important: it's just not right. It's hard to say it better than Donna Summer in She Works Hard for the Money.

Summer wrote this song about Onetta, a bathroom attendant she met at a restaurant who worked for "little money, just tips for pay." Like Onetta, millions of women are still clustered in low-wage jobs working hard for little pay, with women making up nearly 2/3 of workers paid the minimum wage. Fair pay would make a world of difference to these women and their families.

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

It’s Time to Shine A Light on Compensation Data

Posted by
Liz Watson, Senior Advisor
Valarie Hogan, Fellow
| Posted on: April 09, 2013 at 12:50 pm

Oh, glorious spring! The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and all of the metaphorical references to the significance of the season begin again. It’s time to renew, revive, recharge! Unfortunately, federal efforts to collect employee compensation data more closely resemble a tree in winter: frozen and dormant; its fruit trapped in its branches.

A coalition of advocates for equal pay recently sent a letter to President Obama highlighting the problem:

[T]here currently is no mechanism for federal enforcement agencies to detect widespread wage discrimination, even when it occurs in our nation’s largest employers.

If alarm bells aren’t going off inside your brain right now, here’s why they should be:

  1. 50 years after the Equal Pay Act became law, women are still paid 77 cents for every dollar paid to a man; yet, the government does not have the basic information it needs to enforce this law;
  2.  The Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (“OFCCP”) and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) already collect data to aid in the enforcement of other civil rights laws but still do not collect information about pay; and
  3. The vast majority of Americans support federal actions that give women more tools to get fair pay in the workplace.

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

For Equal Pay Day NWLC Releases Materials Providing Fresh Insight into the Wage Gap

Posted by
Abby Lane, Fellow
Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst
Liz Watson, Senior Advisor
| Posted on: April 04, 2013 at 10:38 am

April 9 is Equal Pay Day –the day more than three months into the year when women’s wages finally catch up to what men were paid in the previous year. In “honor” of the occasion National Women’s Law Center is releasing fresh data and analysis on the persistent wage gap between men and women.

This is also a big birthday year – something actually worth celebrating – the Equal Pay Act turns 50 in June! But on the eve of that happy occasion, here’s another downer: As reported in The Wage Gap by State for Women Overall, 50 years in, the wage gap is still going strong all across the U.S.

Since 1963, when the Equal Pay Act became law, we’ve narrowed the wage gap by only 18 cents, and in the last ten years that gap hasn’t closed at all. For the last decade, the median annual earnings of women have lagged behind men – women working full time, year round have made roughly 77 cents for every dollar made by men working full time, year round. We’ve still got a whopping 23 cents to go before we close the wage gap. Even if the wheels of progress were to start turning again today, if we only close the gap another 18 cents in the next 50 years, we’ve got 64 years before the wage gap closes.

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Tags: Employment, Equal Pay, Equal Protection Clause, Wage Gap, Equal Pay and the Wage Gap, Employment | Add new comment