Equal Pay

There are currently two major pieces of legislation in Congress that would help close the wage gap. One is the Paycheck Fairness Act (PFA), which is scheduled for a vote soon. The PFA 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, empowering women and girls by strengthening their negotiation skills, and holding employers more accountable under the Equal Pay Act. The other is one that you might not think of: the Rebuild America Act, which would raise the federal minimum wage from just $7.25 per hour to $9.80 per hour, giving a raise to millions of women workers.

Each year, millions of workers struggle to make ends meet on minimum wage earnings. Roughly two-thirds of these workers are women. They provide care for children and elders, clean homes and offices, and wait tables. Read more »

It's go time!

The Vote is Coming — Call Today!

We need your help to call on the Senate to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Dial 1-888-876-9527 Today!

For the next 48 hours, the National Women's Law Center and organizations across the country are joining forces to turn up the heat on the Senate in support of equal pay. You can help: call 1-888-876-9527 today!

What's the rush?

We expect a vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act in the coming weeks and we need to make sure our Senators hear from us now. For the next 48 hours we want to jam the phones to send a clear message of support for the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Can you take two minutes of your time to call your Senators in support of the Paycheck Fairness Act?

We will make it super-easy. This is all it takes:

1. Dial 1-888-876-9527.
2. Listen to the sample script and follow the instructions for connecting to your Senator's office.
3. Don't neglect your other Senator. Call back and make sure he/she gets a call, too!
4. Double your impact by forwarding this message to a friend.

If you haven't already heard...

The Paycheck Fairness Act would deter wage discrimination by updating the nearly 50-year-old Equal Pay Act, in part by barring retaliation against workers who disclose their own wages to coworkers. Read more »

Connecticut’s legislative session ended last night at midnight. Unfortunately, the Senate did not take up the minimum wage bill that passed the House last month, so many workers struggling to get by on $8.25 an hour will have to wait until at least 2013 to get a raise. (The Senate did act at the last minute to approve a bill permitting the keeping of reindeer year-round, though, so to any Connecticut readers who always wished for Rudolph as a pet, you’re in luck!)  

But all is not lost. As I mentioned earlier this week, bills to raise the state minimum wage are still pending in Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts, and an increase looks likely to be on Missouri’s ballot in November.

And in a very exciting development at the federal level today, Representatives Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Bruce Braley (D-IA) just introduced the Rebuild America Act in the House. Like its companion bill introduced by Senator Harkin, the bill would raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.80 per hour over three years and then index it for inflation, and would also gradually raise the minimum cash wage for tipped workers from $2.13 per hour to 70 percent of the minimum wage. Read more »

77 cents.

That’s what the typical woman working full time, year round makes for every dollar paid to her male counterpart.

Just a few weeks ago, we “celebrated” Equal Pay Day – the day that represents how much longer the typical woman working full time, year round would have to work to be paid as much as the comparable man makes in one year. For the typical woman who makes just short of $37,000 a year, that means working three and a half months longer.

Three and a half months is a lot of extra work. Sadly, it used to be even longer.  In 1963, the year the Equal Pay Act was passed, the typical woman working full time, year round made 59 cents for every dollar paid to her male counterpart. By 1973, the wage gap reached its widest point since the Census Bureau began tracking earnings – the typical woman working full time, year round made less than 57 cents for every dollar made by her male counterpart. Now we’ve been stuck at 77 cents for about a decade. So while the wage gap has shrunk since the Equal Pay Act became law in 1963, it hasn’t come anywhere close to disappearing. 

While we’re still squabbling stateside about emergency contraception, women in London can now order Plan B online to be delivered to their home or office via bike messenger. (Note that we’re talking about Plan B, the “morning after pill,” not mifepristone, the chemical abortion pill that can end pregnancy of up to seven weeks, as Irin Carmon outlines at Slate.)

According to The Daily News, here’s how London-based women can obtain EC through this new service:

To get the emergency contraceptive in your hands quickly, the £20 (24 euros) service involves filling out a short online form that is assessed by an online doctor, with the prescription delivered by courier in as little as two hours.

I guess London didn’t want to be outdone by the vending machine in a university health center that distributes Plan B.

And here I thought it was handy that time I needed an urgent prescription refill the day I was leaving on a trip and was able to call my doctor’s office for a refill which was faxed over to my local CVS so I could pick it up on my way out of town. Read more »

I consider myself a fairly savvy salary negotiator; it’s a point of pride. But apparently, I may be undercutting myself without even knowing it. I just booted up the aptly named Gender Gap App, a game that has you guess whether a salary is the average listed for men or for women in a certain job category.

On top of being good at salary negotiation, I also fancy myself good at mindless cell phone games. You cannot beat my minesweeper score, I promise. But this little game got the better of me. I continually underestimated the average salary for each job category. Even after I saw the pattern, and tried to self-correct, I still thought that jobs paid less than they do.

Several years ago I read an article that said there is less pay disparity between men and women in our Nation’s capital. That article was one of the reasons that I’ve never left Washington—I always figured that over time, I would be better off staying put.

In 2005, I was hired to be the only IT person for a 50-person firm just a few blocks from the White House. They hadn’t had a full-time IT person before, so they said they were looking for a “help-desk” person. When a managing partner made me a formal job offer, the salary was lower than I thought it should be based on the work that needed to be done, but I didn’t really know how to express that without sounding ungrateful for the offer. I had absolutely no idea how to negotiate a job offer, or that you even could! I accepted, and had it in the back of my mind that this was going to be a great learning opportunity with a lot of responsibility, and that I would grow from the experience.

Little did I know! They didn’t need a help-desk person—they needed an entirely new network infrastructure and round-the-clock attention. It was a dynamic place to work, very busy, and when I asked them for more purchasing authority and the freedom to replace the entire network, they happily agreed. That first project was a success, and they gave me a great deal of leeway to take on more responsibility (and more work!). Read more »

On April 17, women’s earnings from 2011 and 2012 will finally match their male counterparts’ 2011 earnings. Yes, it takes women a little over 15 months to make the same income that it takes men to make in 12. How is it that in 2012, women are still only making 77 cents to a man’s dollar? We have been fighting for equality for so long! We have had success – like the Equal Pay Act and, more recently, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. But we still have a long way to go.

We have even further to go now that the Wisconsin legislature and the Governor of Wisconsin repealed the state’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act, which beefed up the penalties for pay discrimination and the relief available to victims. This means that if a woman in Wisconsin finds that she is being paid less than her male counterpart, she has fewer remedies and less relief available to her than she did before.  And given that pay discrimination is hard to identify and hard to challenge, that’s definitely a step in the wrong direction.

The Wisconsin Restaurant Association was among the supporters of the repeal, which is pretty unsettling to me. Currently the tipped minimum wage stands at $2.13/hour, where it’s been stuck since 1991. Women make up two-thirds of employees in tipped jobs. Read more »

Over the last two years, I’ve written an awful lot about the wage gap and fair pay. This year, in honor of Blog for Equal Pay Day I decided to change it up. Behold the results below the jump. Should You Care About the Wage Gap? A Simple Guide!

Maybe I have read Brown Bear Brown Bear a few to many times to my two-year-old daughter. But when I think about the fight for equal pay, this is what I see.

Senator Kennedy (D-MA) never giving up. Even when he was sick, very sick, he pressed forward to fight for equal pay. Before he passed away I had the honor of meeting him. When I shook his hands, they felt like my grandfather’s --- squishy and cloud-like. He is sorely missed, but his fighting spirit for equal pay and justice continues.