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equal pay
'A True Hero': Pay Equity Crusader Lilly Ledbetter Dies at 86
"Let's honor her by continuing to challenge discrimination in all forms—and finally closing the wage gap."
Oct 14, 2024
Labor unions and women's advocacy groups on Monday paid tribute to Lilly Ledbetter, the former Goodyear employee whose fight for equal pay made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress, after her death at the age of 86—with economic justice advocates hailing Ledbetter as "an icon."
"Lilly Ledbetter simply wanted to be paid the same as her male Goodyear co-workers," said the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) on social media. But to workers who have benefited from the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, added the union, "she was a true hero."
Ledbetter began working at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Gadsden, Alabama in 1979, and was initially paid equally to her male counterparts.
But in 1998 she discovered that her compensation had dropped "way out of line" with that of the men who worked alongside her, after someone sent her an anonymous note.
"I felt humiliated. I felt degraded. I had to sort of get my composure back to go ahead to perform my job and then, the first day off, I went to Birmingham, Alabama and filed a charge with the [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission]," Ledbetter toldNPR in 2009.
In 1999, she filed a lawsuit against her employer, and four years later a federal court in Alabama awarded her $3.8 million—a sum that was reduced to a $300,000 cap and $60,000 in back pay.
The case was later appealed and proceeded to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of Goodyear in 2007, with five of the nine justices agreeing that Ledbetter had filed her lawsuit too late after Goodyear's initial decision to pay her less than her male colleagues.
But in 2009, Ledbetter stood with then-President Barack Obama as he signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which gives people more time to file charges regarding unfair pay and affirms that each inequitable paycheck is a violation of the law, an assertion the Supreme Court had rejected.
U.S. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) called on Americans to "honor her legacy by never ceasing in our pursuit of equality and justice for all."
Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women's Law Center, noted that after Ledbetter's legal case concluded, "she never gave up the fight to push for equal pay and fairness for everyone who came after her."
"It would have been easy for Lilly to quietly ease into retirement in Alabama after the Supreme Court held that there was no remedy to the decades of pay discrimination that she faced," said Goss Graves. "But Lilly was not built for the easy road. She shared her story because she knew that her experience of being undervalued and shortchanged on the job was the same story that working women of all ages across America shared, whether they had ever heard of the wage gap or not."
"Even into her 80s, Lilly never hesitated to hop on planes to speak to women across the country about why they must actively fight for wage equality," Goss Graves added.
Ledbetter also stood with Obama in the White House in 2014 when he signed two fair pay executive orders, one barring federal contractors from retaliating against workers who discuss their salaries and one instructing the Labor Department to collect data on pay for men and women who work for federal contractors.
Noreen Farrell, executive director of Equal Rights Advocates (ERA), said Ledbetter "leaves behind a legacy that fuels our ongoing fight against pay discrimination, exploitation, and those who would delay progress towards wage justice for all."
Farrell added that with women—particularly women of color—still earning an average of 82 cents for every dollar men earn in the U.S., "the fight for pay equity is far from over."
"We urge the passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act and the implementation of comprehensive pay transparency measures at the federal level," said Farrell.
The Paycheck Fairness Act would add protections to the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to eliminate gender-based wage disparities.
"Lilly Ledbetter's courageous fight for fair pay made history and opened a new future for millions of women," said Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.). "Let's honor her by continuing to challenge discrimination in all forms—and finally closing the wage gap."
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For Equal Pay Day, Let’s Finally Close the Gender Pay Gap
There has been little progress in narrowing this gender wage gap over the past three decades.
Mar 12, 2024
March 12 is Equal Pay Day, a reminder that there is still a significant pay gap between men and women in our country. The date represents how far into 2024 women would have to work on top of the hours they worked in 2023 simply to match what men were paid in 2023. Women were paid 21.8% less on average than men in 2023, after controlling for race and ethnicity, education, age, and geographic division.
There has been little progress in narrowing this gender wage gap over the past three decades, as shown in Figure A. While the pay gap declined between 1979 and 1994—due to men’s stagnant wages, not a tremendous increase in women’s wages—it has remained mostly flat since then.
The Gender Wage Gap Persists Across the Wage Distribution
The experience of men and women across the wage distribution differs considerably, but the gender wage gap persists no matter how it’s measured. Women are paid less than men as a result of occupational segregation, devaluation of women’s work, societal norms, and discrimination, all of which took root well before women entered the labor market. Figure B shows that women are paid less than men at all parts of the wage distribution.
What’s very stark from the data is that women with advanced degrees are paid less per hour, on average, than men with college degrees.
The wage gap is smallest among lower-wage workers, in part due to the minimum wage creating a wage floor. At the 10th percentile, women are paid $1.86 less an hour, or 12.8% less than men, while at the middle the wage gap is $3.87 an hour, or 14.9%. These low- and middle-wage gaps translate into annual earnings gaps of over $3,800 and $8,000, respectively, for a full-time worker. The 90th percentile is the highest wage category we can compare due to issues with topcoding in the data, which make it difficult to measure wages at the top of the distribution, particularly for men. Women are paid $14.74 less an hour, or 22.6% less, than men at the 90th percentile. That would translate into an annual earnings gap of over $30,000 for a full-time worker.
Women Are Paid Less Than Men at Every Education Level
Despite gains in educational attainment over the last five decades, women still face a significant wage gap. Among workers, women are more likely to graduate from college than men, and are more likely to receive a graduate degree than men. Even so, women are paid less than men at every education level, as shown in Figure C.
Among workers who have only a high school diploma, women are paid 21.3% less than men. Among workers who have a college degree, women are paid 26.8% less than men. That gap of $13.52 on an hourly basis translates to roughly $28,000 less annual earnings for a full-time worker. Women with an advanced degree also experience a significant the wage gap, at 25.2% in 2023. What’s very stark from the data is that women with advanced degrees are paid less per hour, on average, than men with college degrees. Men with a college degree only are paid $50.37 per hour on average compared with $48.21 for women with an advanced degree.
Black and Hispanic Women Experience the Largest Wage Gaps
If the overall gender pay gap isn’t enough cause for alarm, the wage gaps for Black and Hispanic women relative to white men are even larger due to compounded discrimination and occupational segregation based on both gender and race or ethnicity. In Figure D, we compare middle wages—or the average hourly wage between the 40th and 60th percentile of each group’s wage distribution—for white, Black, Hispanic, and Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) women with that of white men.
White women and AAPI women are paid 83.1% and 90.3%, respectively, of what non-Hispanic white men are paid at the middle. Black women are paid only 69.8% of white men’s wages at the middle, a gap of $8.65 on an hourly basis which translates to roughly $18,000 less annual earnings for a full-time worker. For Hispanic women, the gap is even larger at the middle: Hispanic women are paid only 64.6% of white men’s wages, an hourly wage gap of $10.15. For a full-time worker, that gap is over $21,000 a year.
These pay gaps are even larger when examining average hourly wages for all workers instead of just the average for middle-wage workers because of the disproportionate share of highly paid workers who are white men, which pulls up their average. Using the average measure, Black and Hispanic women are paid 63.4% and 58.3%, respectively, of white men’s wages, an hourly wage gap of $14.80 for Black women and $16.90 for Hispanic women. Even when controlling for age, education, and geographic division, Black and Hispanic women are both paid about 68% of white men’s wages. In other words, very little of the observed difference in pay is explained by differences in education, experience, or regional economic conditions.
Policymakers Must Pursue a Range of Options to Close the Gender Pay Gap
There is no silver bullet to solving pay equity, but rather a menu of policy options that can close not only the gender pay gap but also gaps by race and ethnicity. These include requiring federal reporting of pay by gender, race, and ethnicity; prohibiting employers from asking about pay history; requiring employers to post pay bands when hiring; and adequately staffing and funding the Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission and other agencies charged with enforcement of nondiscrimination laws.
We also need policies that lift wages for most workers while also reducing gender and racial/ethnic pay gaps, such as running the economy at full employment, raising the federal minimum wage, and protecting and strengthening workers’ rights to bargain collectively for higher wages and benefits.
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Iceland Becomes First Country to Punish Companies for Paying Women Less Than Men
"In Iceland, an example of what happens if you actually elect women."
Jan 02, 2018
Iceland began the new year by becoming the first country in the world to mandate that all its companies must pay men and women equally. Following years of passing legislation promoting equal pay, employers that fail to ensure pay parity will now be subject to fines, thanks to a law passed last spring that went into effect Monday.
"We have had legislation saying that pay should be equal for men and women for decades now but we still have a pay gap," Dagny Osk Aradottir Pind of the Icelandic Women's Rights Association told Al Jazeera. "We have managed to raise awareness, and we have managed to get to the point that people realize that the legislation we have had in place is not working, and we need to do something more."
Under the new law, companies that employ more than 25 people will have to prove to the government that they're paying men and women equally. Officials hope the move will help Iceland to completely close its gender wage gap by 2020.
Iceland has long been admired by progressives as a model of gender equality, filling nearly 50 percent of its parliament seats with women. Supporters of the new law say it couldn't have been put into action without the strong presence of female lawmakers.
\u201cIn #Iceland, an example of what happens if you actually elect women https://t.co/hkOVLK9RwS via @thinkprogress @transitionmidat #equalpay for women\u201d— Pamela Boyce Simms (@Pamela Boyce Simms) 1514847005
For the past nine years, the small island country has been the world's highest-ranking nation in terms of gender equality according to the World Economic Forum's (WEF) Global Gender Gap Report. Iceland has managed to close its gender gap by about 10 percent since the report was first compiled in 2006, according to the WEF's markers which include political empowerment, economic opportunity, and education access as well as compensation.
As Iceland makes strides in its gender equality goals, the United States' gender wage gap has been narrowing slowly, with women earning 83 percent of men's salaries. The U.S. ranks at number 49 on the WEF's list; less than 20 percent of members of Congress are women.
According to the American Association of University Women, at the wage gap's current rate of narrowing, American women would have to wait until 2119 to be paid equally to their male counterparts. The Trump administration has shown little interest in improving the gap, with the president suspending an Obama-era rule which required employers to provide the government with pay equity data.
Supporters congratulated Iceland on its new system while lamenting the United States' failure to take similar steps.
"We must follow the example of our brothers and sisters in Iceland and demand equal pay for equal work now, regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexuality or nationality," said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on his Facebook page.
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