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

Happy Birthday, Title IX! Love, The Title IXers

Posted by
Liz Watson, Senior Advisor
Samantha Lint, Outreach Intern
| Posted on: June 21, 2012 at 02:44 pm

A group of us from the NWLC kicked off the Title IX 40th anniversary celebration early... We started whooping it up at 7:30 am on a recent Saturday morning when we took our places at the starting line of the Lawyers’ Have Heart 10K race in Washington. We continued the festivities by running 6.2 miles in the grueling D.C. heat.

In honor of the anniversary, we called our team The Title IXers.


The Title IXers before our run
The Title IXers before our run

NWLC’s Title IXers range in age from early 20s to early 40s. We are all beneficiaries of Title IX. It’s because of that law that we grew up in a time when girls’ and young women’s participation in elementary school, middle school, high school and college sports was a given.

Many of us were active in sports then and still are today. We ran, swam and played for the Panthers, the Knights, the Lions, the Bulldogs, the Blazers, the Gators and the Mutts. Through sports, we’ve formed friendships, learned life lessons, become leaders, stayed healthy and had a huge amount of fun. And most of the time, we think of this as nothing to write home about.

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Tags: Title IX, Athletics, Education & Title IX | 1 comment

Setting the Record Straight on the Paycheck Fairness Act

Posted by Liz Watson, Senior Advisor | Posted on: June 07, 2012 at 10:32 am

"The Trial Lawyer Paycheck Act," a piece that ran on the Opinion page of the Wall Street Journal on Monday, is riddled with falsehoods about the Paycheck Fairness Act, which failed to garner the 60 votes needed to defeat a filibuster in the Senate on Tuesday. It's time to set the record straight.

1. False: The Wall Street Journal claimed that existing laws are adequate to address pay discrimination.

The Truth: Existing laws do not sufficiently protect women from wage discrimination. How do we know that's true? Because wage discrimination is still pervasive today, although it has been illegal since the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963. The Lily Ledbetter Act, passed in 2009, keeps the courthouse doors from being slammed shut on women who are subject to wage discrimination by merely restoring the law about when employees can bring these claims to what it was prior to the Supreme Court's 2007 decision in Ledbetter. The Paycheck Fairness Act is crucial to preventing that discrimination from occurring in the first place. It would strengthen the Equal Pay Act in critical ways by ensuring that women can find out whether they are being paid less than their male counterparts without putting their jobs at risk and giving women the tools they need to combat wage discrimination.

2. False: "To the extent there remains a male-female wage gap, it is mostly a function of occupational and lifestyle choices."

The Truth: Research has conclusively shown that after controlling for the other factors that might explain the difference in pay between men and women, time out of the workforce, job tenure, occupational choices, and the like, there is still a very significant wage gap that is entirely unexplained by any of these factors.

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Tags: Equal Pay, Paycheck Fairness Act, Equal Pay and the Wage Gap, Employment | 1 comment

We Need a Law That Truly Works to End Pay Discrimination Against Women

Posted by Liz Watson, Senior Advisor | Posted on: June 06, 2012 at 04:18 pm

Yesterday, Senator Heller of Nevada introduced the End Pay Discrimination Through Information Act. Speaking on the Senate floor he said, "No one in this body should be so naïve as to think that pay discrimination has been eliminated." At NWLC, we couldn't agree more. But that's where our agreement with Senator Heller ends. The PFA contains commonsense provisions to help put a stop to wage discrimination, including negotiation training for employees, assistance to employers on coming into compliance with the law, awards for those employers who are at the forefront of fair pay practices, and research, public education and outreach to solve this persistent problem. In addition, it closes giant loopholes in the defenses available to employers that have threatened to swallow the prohibition on wage discrimination whole, and provides for the same damages in sex-based wage discrimination cases that are available to employees in race and national origin cases. It also ensures that employees can talk about their wages without putting their jobs at risk, so that they know when discrimination has occurred.

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