On August 26 we celebrated Women’s Equality Day — the 89th anniversary of the date on which women gained the right to vote through ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. Since then, women have sought economic equality, too, achieving a great victory in 1963 with the passage of the Equal Pay Act.
But it has been a rocky road, and we are at another milestone in the struggle for equal pay. When the 1963 law was passed, women earned 59 cents for every dollar men earned doing the same work. Now it’s still only 80 cents on the dollar. The Paycheck Fairness Act, which would greatly strengthen the Equal Pay Act, has been passed by the House and is now pending before the Senate.
A landmark bill, the 1963 Equal Pay Act gave hope to millions of working women that they would no longer be second-class citizens in the workplace. Along with passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act a year later, it meant perhaps the tide of wage discrimination was finally turning.
It didn’t. Years of hostile court rulings whittled away the law’s protections. Employers could defend themselves against charges of discrimination by citing a “factor other than sex” to justify disparities. That phrase has been stretched beyond recognition as judges adopted the interpretations urged on them by recalcitrant employers.
Paycheck fairness is not just a matter of principle. It’s a matter of survival. Inequality begins with minor discrepancies — young women age 15 to 24 earn 95% of what young men earn. By the time women reach age 45 to 64 — usually the prime years for higher earnings — women who work full-time, year-round earn only 72% of what men do. Not only are their current wages depressed, but their ability to provide for their children’s future and to retire with a decent income is severely compromised.
It’s clear that millions of women need a law that works. The first attempts to fix the Equal Pay Act go back to 1994. After 15 years of struggle, the hope is that with a new Congress progress is now possible.
The pending Paycheck Fairness Act would permit victims to obtain compensatory and punitive damages. It would make it easier to pursue class-action lawsuits. It would bar employer retaliation when victims share salary information among themselves. It would disallow such employer defenses as “the male employee had better salary negotiating skills.” And it would permit victims to use wage and salary comparisons between employees among different offices in the same county.
The Equal Pay Act needs new muscle in order to fulfill its original promise. Wage and salary inequity has continued long enough. While women have picked up 31 cents in 45 years, at this rate it will take another 29 years to reach parity — more than a century after women got the vote.
It’s past time for the Senate to act so that President Obama can sign a bill that opens a new chapter in enforcing the Equal Pay Act and offers new hope that wage inequality will no longer burden women trying to earn a fair day’s pay. And it’s surely way past time for Women’s Equality Day to be celebrated amid real equality.
Nancy Ratzan is president of the National Council of Jewish Women.
The Forward welcomes reader comments in order to promote thoughtful discussion on issues of importance to the Jewish community. In the interest of maintaining a civil forum, the Forward requires that all commenters be appropriately respectful toward our writers, other commenters and the subjects of the articles. Vigorous debate and reasoned critique are welcome; name-calling and personal invective are not. While we generally do not seek to edit or actively moderate comments, the Forward reserves the right to remove comments for any reason.
To post a comment, click to login:
Copyright © 2012, Forward Association, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Despite women's 40-year-old demand for equal wages, millions of married women still choose to have no wages at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of The Secrets of Happily Married Women, stay-at-home wives, including those who are childless, constitute a growing niche. "In the past few years,” he says in a CNN August 2008 report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier....” at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka.)
As full-time mothers or homemakers, these women earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living lives of luxury? Virtually any teen-ager knows the answer: “They are supported by their husband!”
So if millions of wives can accept no wages, millions of other wives can accept low wages, can refuse to work overtime, can refuse promotions, can take more unpaid days off — all because their husbands are willing to support them.
What about single women hoping to marry? Most are aware of men's willingness to sooner or later economically support the woman they marry. Thus countless single women configure their jobs, careers, and aspirations accordingly. Many actively look for a man who earns enough to offer them the three options cited by Warren Farrell in "Why Men Earn More": work full-time, work part-time, or work full-time as a housewife. These women often regard a husband as their primary employer. In return for their husband's media-unappreciated generosity, these women plan to offer him three slightly different options: work full-time, work full-time, work full-time with overtime when the wife departs from the workforce, nearly always at a time of her choosing.
Men's willingness to support their wives is the underlying real reason for the sexes' infamous wage gap, women's 78 cents to men's dollar.
To many, the current legislation to increase women's pay is absurd because it ignores choice. As long as we're considering absurd measures, here's one that would close the gender wage gap almost overnight: a law that prohibits men from supporting women.
If men weren't allow to support women, unemployed wives would have to work. Millions of employed women would be forced to obtain a better one. “Without husbands," says Farrell, "women have to focus on earning more. They work longer hours, they're willing to relocate and they're more likely to choose higher-paying fields like technology. Women who have never been married and are childless earn 117 percent of their childless male counterparts." (See http://tinyurl.com/nm6t6s.)
I do nor believe in equal pay for each sex, but I do believe in equal pay for equal performance regardless of sex. I notice that Ms. Ratzan does not use performance reviews as a measure of whether a woman should get more money or not. She is using the old union argument that "mediocrity" is good enough to justify equal pay with a superior performer. That destroys initiative and creates a bad business environment.