Sexism in America by Barbara J. Berg

Author:Barbara J. Berg
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2012-07-19T16:00:00+00:00

Equal Pay for Equal Work? Don’t Bet on It

“I don’t think anyone would ever say I couldn’t do the job as well as a man,” Christine Kwapnoski, a manager at a Sam’s Club in northern California, said. And yet, the forty-two-year-old Kwapnoski earned less than the man she oversaw when she was a dock supervisor. She received a promotion, but no raise came with it, although men with the same promotions got increases. She complained, but “[b]asically I was told it was none of my business, that there was nothing I could do about it.”

“Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, women of all economic levels—poor, middle class, and rich—were steadily gaining ground on their male counterparts in the work force,” reported David Leonhardt for the New York Times in 2006. “By the mid-90s, women earned more than 75 cents for every dollar in hourly pay that men did, up from 65 cents just 15 years earlier.” Back then it was possible to believe that the gap was closing. Today it seems unlikely.

The gender pay gap is actually widening for those with four-year college degrees. And it’s not—as so many argue—because we’re taking time off to be with our children. A new report by the AAUW finds that the gap in pay starts immediately after graduation and only increases over time. As Catherine Hill, research director of the study, explained to me, “Right out of school there should be a fairly level playing field, but surprisingly women are already earning 20 percent less, even when they have the same major and occupation as their male counterparts. This, although women earn slightly higher GPAs than men in every college major including science and mathematics.”

Women who attended elite colleges earned about the same as men from minimally selective colleges, the report found. And the pay gap is the widest for women in the top professions. They lose about $1.2 million over the course of a lifetime; for the average worker it’s about $700,000.

Women employed full-time make an average of seventy-seven cents for every dollar men are paid. The ratio is worse for women of color. African American women get only seventy-one cents and Latinas fifty-eight cents. And this includes women in academia.

Kwapnoski is now part of a class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart, owner of Sam’s Club. “[But] government’s efforts to reduce sex discrimination have ebbed over the period that the pay gap has stagnated. In the 1960s and 1970s laws like Title VII and Title IX prohibited discrimination at work and in school and may have helped close the pay gap in subsequent years,” wrote Leonhardt. These laws are still in existence, of course; they’re just not being enforced.

The 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear made it harder for workers to sue for pay discrimination. Lilly Ledbetter, the only female among sixteen men at the Gadsden, Alabama, tire plant, discovered, when she was close to retirement, that for years she’d been paid less than her male colleagues, including those with less seniority.

Always clear about its priorities, the Bush administration filed a brief on the side of Goodyear.

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