The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

Equal Pay Act Supported, Needed Now More Than Ever

Feature Story by Tia Sumler - 6/28/2001

On the 38th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act, advocates for working families and women of all stripes came together at a press conference on Capitol Hill to demand enforcement and strengthening of the existing act, and to urge support of the Fair Pay Act. Accentuating the universal significance of the equal pay issue, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) noted, "The wage gap is not just a so-called 'women's issue.' It is a family issue. The average American family loses $4,000 a year to unequal pay. That not only hurts women, it hurts single mothers, it hurts working couples, it hurts families, and it hurts our nation's economy."

In America today, women earn 74 cents for each dollar earned by men. The reasons for this inequality vary, from discrimination in hiring to pay discrimination to "occupational segregation," or the disparity in pay between comparable positions traditionally held by members of one gender or the other that are "different in characteristics but equivalent in content, including skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions." A study by the AFL-CIO and the Women's Institute for Policy Research shows that men are adversely affected by this pay gap-the men working in predominantly female occupations (librarians, cashiers, child care workers) lose an average of $6, 259 in pay per year.

Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton described Sen. Tom Daschle's, (D-IA) Paycheck Fairness Act as offering "urgently needed updated provisions to the Equal Pay Act... includ[ing] sections to keep employers from gagging employees by threatening them with sanctions for freely discussing and learning the wages of their co-workers, enabling women to engage in self-help to demand wage increases where appropriate; and provisions that allow compensatory and punitive damages, as well as class actions, all routinely available in other civil rights legislation, and all necessary today if deterrence and compliance are serious goals."

The Fair Pay Act addresses occupational segregation to positions held by members of the other gender. Sponsored in the House by Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) and in the Senate by Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), the Act would find discrimination not only when a male and female in the same job with equal experience and skills are paid different wages, but also when a male and female in comparable jobs are paid different wages. Twenty states have already undertaken job evaluations for comparable positions and, as a result, women's wages in those states have increased. Congresswoman Norton and Senator Harkin have sent a letter requesting that the GAO conduct a review of these evaluations and their effects on state budgets and economies.