Equal Pay

Calling all bloggers! On Equal Pay Day – April 9, 2013 – the National Women’s Law Center will be hosting our annual Blog for Equal Pay Day blog carnival. And we want you to participate!

This June, it will be 50 years since President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act into law. And today, women still make just 77 cents for every dollar a man makes — that's nearly $11,000 in lost wages every year.

That’s why we’re asking bloggers to participate in this year’s Blog for Equal Pay Day by answering the question, “What would you do with your $11,000 in lost wages?” in your blog posts, but you’re also welcome to choose an alternative topic. Please feel free to include policy analysis, personal experiences, reports, graphs, etc in your blog posts as well!

NWLC will collect and publish links to the blog posts on Equal Pay Day (April 9, 2013). Click through for all the details you need to get involved in the blog carnival. Read more »

I write an awful lot about why it’s so important for women to raise the federal minimum wage, so I’m especially excited to head to Capitol Hill today for a press conference on the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, which Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Representative George Miller (D-CA) will introduce at noon. Introducing this crucial legislation is an essential first step towards fairer pay for millions of women across the country.

The Fair Minimum Wage Act would gradually raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 per hour, increase the minimum cash wage for tipped workers from $2.13 per hour to 70 percent of the regular minimum wage, and index these wages to keep up with inflation. Women especially stand to benefit from this proposal because they are about two-thirds of workers earning the federal minimum wage or less – and they are the majority of workers in the ten largest occupations that typically pay less than $10.10 per hour. As new analysis from NWLC shows, women are at least two-thirds of the workforce in seven of those ten occupations:

Women’s concentration in such low-wage jobs is one of the reasons we still see a large gap between women’s and men’s typical earnings: American women who work full time, year round are paid only 77 cents for every dollar paid to their male counterparts, and the wage gap is even wider for women of color. Read more »

I’ve been a longtime fan of the USA network TV show Suits – it’s set at a (fictional) law firm in New York, Pearson Hardman, and focuses on the exploits of a witty college dropout who has never been to law school and the firm partner who had the audacity to hire him as an associate. Last Thursday night’s episode featured Pearson Hardman taking on a class action lawsuit accusing a fictional company, Folsom Foods, of gender discrimination: they failed to promote qualified women. One of the lawyers on the case noticed that when women were denied for promotions, the company used the following descriptors to justify the choice: “high-strung,” “sensitive,” “aggressive,” and “abrasive.” These women were being passed over for promotions for reasons unrelated to their performance or their ability to fulfill their job responsibilities – but rather due to stereotypes about women in the workplace. Read more »

Given the fact that the anniversary of the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was yesterday, it seems only fitting that this past week’s episode of NBC’s Parks & Recreation focused on gender equality in the workplace.

For those unfamiliar with the show, Parks & Recreation (or Parks & Rec, as it is known lovingly among its fan base) is about Leslie Knope, a mid-level government employee in a small town in Indiana. She is dedicated to her job and the town she grew up in, and many feminists and TV fans have lauded the show as an example of a great feminist character. And for good reason – Leslie is dedicated, passionate, and very human (she has an absolutely adorable relationship with her fiancée, Ben, and a deep love of waffles and whipped cream that I can 100% relate to). Leslie has grown from simply a government employee to a City Council Member, and she aspires to climb the ranks all the way to President. Plus, the show is just absolutely hilarious.

This week, the episode opened with the ladies of the Pawnee, Indiana Parks Department in a meeting with the first female city councilmember. She lamented about the fact that her male counterparts used to keep a calendar of her menstrual cycles – something that sounds beefed up for the sake of comedy, but actually hits closer to hope than you might think: In October, CNN posted (and quickly took down) a story saying that hormones can make female voters vote more liberally because it makes them “feel sexier.” Read more »

Rocket ships are popular with the space kids who live at my house. Stomp rockets. Model rockets. Rockets made from empty paper towel rolls and popsicle sticks. No matter what type of rocket, there is always a countdown and there is always a blast off.

Today is the anniversary of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. What better time could there be to get moving on a state-of-the-art plan to rocket to fair pay? Our progress in narrowing the wage gap ground to a halt ten years ago, after two decades of steady improvement. If you're sick and tired of hearing that the typical woman is still paid 77 cents for every dollar paid to the typical man, do the 5-4-3-2-1 countdown with me of what it would take to finally close the wage gap:

5. Ensure that women have the same opportunities and encouragement as men to train for well-paying jobs, many of which are in fields in which women are currently underrepresented. Read more »

This guest-post was written by Lilly Ledbetter.

President Obama signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Four years ago today, President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act — giving more women the opportunity to challenge pay discrimination in the workplace. That day was incredibly gratifying for me personally, since it meant that no other woman or man would suffer the injustice of learning that they had been paid unfairly for years, and then being told it was simply too late to do anything about it.

Ensuring that women have the tools they need to address pay discrimination is just as important now as it was then. In fact, the wage gap between men and women hasn’t budged in the last ten years, with women still earning 77 cents on average for every dollar earned by the typical man, and that number is worse for women of color. Even a college degree fails to close the gap — a recent AAUW report showed that the wage gap is present at college graduation with women making, on average, 82% of what a man makes.

Numbers and statistics about the progress for women in some areas, and lack thereof in others, made headlines in the 2012 — from the record number of women in Congress to a pointed debate question about the persistence of the wage gap.

To commemorate the fourth anniversary of the Fair Pay Act, here are four facts impacting the fight for equal pay for equal work today:

Four: As I said at the Democratic National Convention [video] in September, what a difference four years make! On January 29, 2009, President Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act — the first law passed during his presidency. The law ensures that everyone who experiences pay discrimination gets their day in court by restarting the time limit to file a claim with each discriminatory paycheck. Read more »

Four years ago today President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law, restoring the law that existed for decades in virtually every region of the country prior to the 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. The importance of the Ledbetter Act cannot be overstated – in the last 4 years, workers have once again been able to challenge unfair pay in court and pay discrimination claims around the country have been restored.

But even four years ago at the signing of the bill that bears her name, Lilly Ledbetter said the following: “With this bill in place, we now can move forward to where we all hope to be – improving the law, not just restoring it.” Those words are especially true today. The most recent data shows that woman working full time, year round are paid 77 cents for every dollar paid to their male counterparts. This is a statistic that is unchanged from not only four years ago, but this gap has remained the same for a decade. For women of color, it’s much worse, with the typical African-American woman paid 64 cents and the typical Latina woman paid 55 cents for every dollar paid to a white, non-Hispanic man. A gap in wages occurs at all education levels, after work experience is taken into account, and it gets worse as women’s careers progress.

If we pair these disturbing statistics with the severe limits to existing laws and policies it is even grimmer. Workers are frequently left in the dark about wage disparities, a problem that is exacerbated by employers that penalize their employees for revealing or discussing wages. In addition, even when women somehow muster enough information to prove discrimination, the remedies are extremely narrow. This means that there are too few incentives for employers to voluntarily comply with the law, and engaging in pay discrimination can be simply an unfortunate “cost” of doing business. Read more »

One year ago, President Obama announced new regulations proposed by the Department of Labor (DOL) that would grant minimum wage and overtime pay to home care workers, a workforce that has been unfairly denied these basic protections for decades. In his remarks last December, he described a day he spent with Pauline Beck, a home care worker from Oakland, California:

“When we met, she was getting up every day at 5:00 a.m. to go to work taking care of an 86-year-old amputee named ‘Mr. John.’ And each day, she’d dress Mr. John and help him into his wheelchair. She’d make him breakfast. She’d scrub his floors. She’d clean his bathroom. She was his connection to the outside world. And when the workday was done, she would go home to take care of a grandnephew and two foster children who didn’t have families of their own. Heroic work, and hard work. That’s what Pauline was all about.”

Pauline’s story is illustrative. Like Pauline, most home care workers are women. They take on the vitally important work of caring for our neighbors and family members who need help to stay in their homes – and like Pauline, many home care workers also have their own families to support. But for decades, their difficult and demanding jobs have come without the basic protections of the federal minimum wage and overtime laws. Read more »

Scientists recently did an experiment regarding equal pay with Capuchin monkeys, and the results were interesting - and obvious. The Capuchin who had been underpaid with a piece of cucumber instead of with a grape for performing exactly the same task repeatedly threw it at the experimenter in protest.

Go, Capuchin monkeys!

As an article by Kasey Edwards in Daily Life notes, the monkey’s demand for equal pay for equal work appeared to be a natural instinct, but it is difficult for women to negotiate their wages when they don’t know if they are being paid less for the same work.

Unlike grapes and cucumbers distributed in clear plastic containers in full view of the monkeys, paychecks for humans come in sealed envelopes, and most employers either explicitly prohibit discussions of pay or discourage employees from disclosing wages to their coworkers. It’s difficult to challenge unfair pay practices when a female worker has no idea what her male coworker sitting across the hall is making. Read more »

The American Association of University Women (AAUW) just published its report on the gender gap after college graduation, Graduating to a Pay Gap: The Earnings of Women and Men One Year after College Graduation. Limiting responses to recent graduates just one year out, the report reveals some well-known truths, some not well-known truths, and some startling revelations about Bachelor degree recipients.

There is a gender gap… and it starts early

On average, women make less than men make. We know this: it is well-documented; there are laws in place to prevent it. You can find differences among states here and helpful FAQs here.

Opponents of pay fairness legislation try to explain away the wage gap; they claim it is a matter of individual choice. Women work fewer hours, take time off for children, and “prefer” certain fields. But did you know that recent college graduates – women who are young, relatively inexperienced, often without children – face pay discrimination just like older women? From the beginning of their careers, women earn less than men. Even with average higher GPAs, women still make less than men. According to the report, women recent graduates, on average, make only $35,296 to men’s $42,918 (82% of men’s wages). Read more »