Every week, it seems like my box is flooded with urgent emails exhorting me to sign a petition, attend a rally, or call my senator about Iraq, Darfur, global warming, gay marriage, or any number of worthy causes. But I'm not expecting to get many invites to protest yesterday's Supreme Court decision, which severely limited workers' ability to sue for pay discrimination.
Don't get me wrong. This 5-4 ruling is egregiously wrong. It overturned a jury's award to Lily Ledbetter, a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company supervisor of 19 years who earned as much as 40 percent less than her male co-workers, finding that employees must complain within 180 days of each alleged discriminatory pay decision in order to prevail. (Never mind that employers often do their best to hide pay discrimination, or that wage gaps tend to widen over time, as subsequent raises are based on the original low pay.)
Still, when it comes to news about the wage gap between men and women these days, reaction often amounts to a collective shrug. When a new report was released last month, showing that only one year after college graduation, women earn 20 percent less than their male peers, the story wasn't splashed across the cover of Time or Newsweek. It wasn't a hot topic on the cable chat circuit, even though the research by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation found that ten years after graduation, the gap expands, with women's salaries 31 percent lower.
Media coverage was perfunctory. I didn't get a single email about the issue, let alone hear about any churches, synagogues, or political groups chartering buses to Washington D.C. or organizing demonstrations against the injustice.
Instead of provoking outrage, the news seemed to elicit a yawn. Haven't we heard this before? As it happens, we have -- many times, over many years. In the 1980s, when so many of us were graduating from college and flooding the workforce, we even knew our number by heart: 59 cents. That was how much women, employed full-time, made for every dollar men earned; Geraldine Ferraro famously mentioned it during her vice presidential nomination acceptance speech (though numbers I've seen since suggest it was probably closer to 65 cents). Young women like myself were pretty confident that the pay gap would soon be history, as record numbers of women were getting educated and seeking professional jobs -- supposedly the reason for the gap in the first place.
But by the mid-1990s, when women earned about 75 cents for every dollar men earned, progress seemed to come to a halt. Since then, report after report has been issued, confirming the depressing reality that not much has changed since. Women at all income levels and across a wide range of occupations still make less than their male counterparts. At the present rate, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research, it will take perhaps 50 years before women reach parity -- too late for my two young daughters, let alone this generation of women in the labor force.
Of course, there are those who chop and dice the numbers to support their argument that the wage gap is a result of women's different "choices." We pick "family-friendly" jobs that earn less. We drop out to have babies. Or we don't know how to negotiate. Certainly, there is some truth to all of that. But, when researchers control for marital status, race, industry, occupation, and other factors that historically have affected income, they still find a wage gap. And as the AAUW report shows, it surfaces one year after getting a diploma, before most women have children, and persists even when women have had the same education, majors, and occupations as men.
So why doesn't this rank high on our list of injustices? In the 1960s and 1970s, when Equal Pay for Equal Work was a rallying cry, women successfully pushed for change because they believed in the idea of collective action. They didn't just join national organizations -- they formed local women's groups, sometimes inside workplaces, to make sure women were getting the same opportunities as men and raised hell if they didn't. Somewhere along the way, women left that to HR, diversity committees, and lawyers filing the occasional discrimination lawsuits.
A couple years ago, I was a moderator on a panel that included top women executives. When a young audience member asked, in an accusatory tone, why women at the top weren't doing more to mentor young women in their organization, the response was that young women shouldn't expect women leaders to mentor them just because they're of the same gender. At the time, I didn't think that was such bad advice -- I've had some fantastic male bosses. And why should the lone woman at the top be expected to champion someone just because she's female?
But having covered diversity efforts at countless Fortune 500 organizations and seen the notable lack of progress, now I see things differently. Not too long ago, one woman I know took a buy-out because, she confided, she wasn't permitted to telecommute one day a week. Another left another major firm because a new boss declared there would be no more flextime and wanted her to work a job that would require a 90-minute commute. They hit the "maternal wall," that sometimes subtle and often overt discrimination against working mothers, and couldn't fight it individually.
But what if they -- and the Goodyear supervisor Lilly Ledbetter -- had organized a few other women employees and tracked the metrics -- women's promotions, salaries, alternative work arrangements and productivity?
At this point, I know there will be people ready to send me indignant emails about mothers' organizations that have newly formed. These sound wonderful, but they're run largely by at-home or work-from-home mothers. And yes, I know that a couple of U.S. senators and representatives recently introduced bills to address equal pay issues, but these bills (or very similar versions) have been introduced before and died. It's also clear we cannot count on the higher courts -- stacked with six years' worth of Bush appointees -- to correct gender discrimination.
So, while it may sound retro and quixotic, my guess is women will continue to earn less and face all the maddening inequities unless and until, a whole bunch of women inside companies get really angry and speak up for each other.