Equal Pay

Eduardo Porter’s article last week in The New York Times, Motherhood Still a Cause of Pay Inequality, has a good discussion of the gender wage gap – it highlights the slowed progress in closing the gap and discusses many of the issues that contribute to women’s lower pay including occupational segregation, caregiving responsibilities, and discrimination.

However, Porter gets it wrong when he says that passing the Paycheck Fairness Act, which failed to get a vote in the Senate last week, might actually increase women’s unemployment. As Fatima Goss Graves debunked this myth in our blog:

Opponents of the Paycheck Fairness Act complain that the bill will hurt the economy and increase unemployment among women. These are not new arguments when it comes to fair employment laws – in fact, some of these same arguments were made 50 years ago when the Equal Pay Act itself was passed.

Welcome to another roundup! This week we have stories about gender-based wage discrimination for physicians, one popular website’s efforts to transform the male-dominated engineering field, and a 1963 PSA depicting Batgirl battling unequal pay…which is awesome.

The 49th Anniversary of the passage of the Equal Pay Act (EPA) 1963 has led to the internet re-circulation of this 1963 PSA promoting the EPA. The clip features Batgirl coming to the rescue of Batman and Robin. Before saving them, Batgirl takes the opportunity to voice her concern for gender-based wage discrimination: “I've worked for you a long time, and I'm paid less than Robin! Same job, same employer means equal pay for men and women!”

Unfortunately, Batgirl would be disappointed that 49 years after the EPA, American women are still a far cry from achieving equal pay for equal work. The wage gap has narrowed (in 1963, women earned 59 cents to every dollar earned by a man. Today, women earn 77 cents to a man’s dollar) but the 18 cent shift over 49 years just isn’t enough.Batgirl would also be up to her Bat Utility Belt in  outrage to know that on June 5, the U.S. Senate failed to move forward the Paycheck Fairness Act (PFA), a bill intended to update the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Learn more about how the PFA would strengthen the EPA. Read more »

As the Paycheck Fairness Act headed to the floor for debate and a vote earlier this week, the Washington Post's Fact Checker blog questioned the validity of the figure most often referenced (and the figure we use at NWLC) – that the typical woman working full time, year round is paid just 77 cents to her male counterpart (the 23 cent gap). We produced this FAQ in response.

1. What is the wage gap figure?

   Our blog post from September explains all the details of how we calculate the wage gap – like how earnings are defined, which workers are included in our calculations, and which Census Bureau data we use – basically, we compare how much money the typical woman and the typical man make when they work full time, year round.

2. Why do we use this figure?

   Here at NWLC, we use the 77 cent figure because it captures the effects of many elements that produce the wage gap – including discrimination, caregiving responsibilities and occupational segregation – and demonstrates just how strongly they impact the economic security of women workers.

"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. Read more »

This morning the Senate took to the floor to debate the Paycheck Fairness Act (PFA), a bill that would give workers stronger tools to combat wage discrimination, bar retaliation against workers for discussing salary information, and ensure full compensation for victims of gender-based pay discrimination. This afternoon the PFA failed to garner the 60 votes needed to end debate in a 52-47 vote that stuck to party lines.

While I was watching the debate, numerous Senators spoke in support of the PFA. They spoke to the many issues that matter in this fight – the (obvious) reasons women should be paid fairly, how we can boost women’s economic security by passing the PFA, how fair pay for women is good for families, and more. Senator Durbin made a point that particularly resonated with me. He simply said: protection for women and their families used to be bipartisan.

This clearly should be a bipartisan issue. The fact of the matter is that the typical woman working full time, year round is still paid just 77 cents for every dollar paid to her male counterpart, a figure that has barely budged over the last decade. Part of this 23 cent difference can be explained by occupations, work hours, and experience. But the truth of the matter is – much of the wage gap is entirely unaccounted for by these factors, and court cases show that discrimination continues to play a significant role in the wage gap. Read more »

Mad about the vote?

Help spread the word about equal pay for women.

Just moments ago, the Paycheck Fairness Act failed to get the 60 votes needed to move forward in the Senate. Fifty-two Senators voted to allow it to proceed, while 47 opposed it.

For the thousands of you who sent emails, made calls and met with your Members of Congress on this very important bill, this is a huge disappointment. We thank you for standing with us, and we urge you to continue the fight.

In the wake of a disappointing vote, help us get the message out about the importance of equal pay for women by sharing this video:

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Or, forward this email and ask your friends and family to watch the video

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. Read more »

For nearly 50 years, federal law has banned the payment of unequal wages to women and men who perform the same job. Yet women today still make only 77 cents for every dollar paid to their male counterparts – an improvement of only 18 cents over the last several decades. And for women of color, the gap is even larger.

The Paycheck Fairness Act would strengthen current laws against wage discrimination by protecting employees who voluntarily share pay information with colleagues from retaliation, fully compensating victims of sex-based pay discrimination, and holding employers more accountable under the Equal Pay Act. These proposals would finally move the ball forward on the wage gap that has inched along over the last 50 years and remained stagnant over the last decade.

In recent weeks, opponents of the Paycheck Fairness Act have put forth rhetoric that downplays the wage gap and mischaracterizes the commonsense proposals in the bill. To restore some reality to the debate, I’ve unpacked five absurd myths that have emerged as the Senate prepares to consider the Paycheck Fairness Act next week. Read more »

To flip an old phrase, the political is personal. And as a young woman in the beginning of my professional life, the Paycheck Fairness Act is very personal.

For those of you who don’t know, the Paycheck Fairness Act is a bill that would strengthen the Equal Pay Act by prohibiting employers from retaliating against employees for sharing information about their wages, improving data collection and enforcement by government agencies, closing loopholes that courts have opened in the law, and making it easier for employees to come together as a group to challenge discriminatory pay policies.

Apologies if that sounds wonky, but I promise you, these policy changes can have personal impact. Check out the wage gap in your home state (I hope you’ve had the chance to look at our beautiful state by state fact sheets on the wage gap). These female cents on the male dollar figures - 77 cents nationally, 76 cents in my home state of Illinois, 91 cents in Washington, DC - aren’t just arbitrary numbers. They translate into real money that never finds its way into your bank account simply because of your gender.

Did you know that a typical woman loses out on $431,000 in earnings over a forty-year period? That’s less money to pay back student loans, buy a house or car, send children to college, save for retirement, go on vacation, contribute to charity, or simply buy Ben and Jerry’s when it’s not on sale! Read more »

When I heard Alex Castellanos on “Meet the Press” contend that the wage gap is a myth a few weeks back, I choked on my green tea.

Data show that it persists across nearly all demographics and sectors of society. And equal pay for equal work seems like a non-partisan issue of fairness to me. But Castellanos wants to wave a wand and make those facts disappear.

Compared to my friends graduating this year, I feel pretty lucky that I have another two years before I enter the full-time job market. Bleak statistics on job placement for recent grads has me anxious about my future. Top that off with my soon-to-increase student loan rate (you’re welcome millionaires, enjoy your continued tax breaks) and my hope to continue my education beyond undergrad and my financial security is, well, nonexistent. Oh, and since I’m a woman, my new degree is very likely to earn me less than my male peers with the same degree starting year one, even though I’ve done everything right. Trust me, if I had a magic wand, I’d make the wage gap a thing of the past – but I don’t, and I’m worried. Read more »