In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, the daunting and complicated task of distributing victim compensation began to take shape. The compensation plan, as it was originally proposed, was based on outdated government formulas which assumed that women victims would have worked for less of their lives than their male counterparts. In effect, the proposed system of compensation was providing less for the families of women victims simply because they were the families of women victims.
It was a sobering reminder of how institutionalized gender discrimination can be. This isn't from a history book - it is not an example of how difficult it was for women of our grandmothers' generation. This is an example of how women as young as our daughters, in this decade, are still facing the same obstacles we vowed to eradicate. I am proud to have successfully fought for equal compensation after September 11th, but know that there are many battles yet to be won.
Today is Equal Pay Day; the day that symbolizes how far into the year that the average full-time working woman must work to earn as much as the average full-time working man earned the previous year. Women earn just 78 cents on the dollar as compared to their male counterparts. While we've made great progress in closing the gap between men's and women's wages since President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, considerable work remains.
The federal government should be a model employer, but a GAO report released today, requested by myself and Senators Harkin and Kennedy, finds that an 11 cent on the dollar gender pay gap remains. 7 cents of that gap cannot be explained away by occupational and educational differences. In other words, it appears that even in the federal government, discrimination against women in the workforce persists.
Unfortunately, the findings in this report are not unexpected. Prejudices against working women take all shapes and forms. A GAO study I requested in 2003 confirmed that men with children earn about 2 percent more than men without children, while women with children earn about 2.5 percent less than women without children. So fathers enjoy a bonus, while mothers pay a penalty for their choices.
The impact of the wage gap is particularly painful in our current economic downturn as families struggle to make ends meet in the face of stagnant wages and job losses. Women make up more than 46 percent of the workforce and, as the number of working women continues to grow, so does the number of families reliant solely on the salaries of women. Since the recession began in December 2007, 3.7 million men have lost their jobs; creating even more families dependant on the smaller pay checks women earn.
The first bill President Obama signed into law was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. It was an important first step, signaling to women and their families that Congress and President Obama are committed to narrowing the gender pay gap. But additional work on multiple fronts is needed if we are ever to eliminate the gap.
First, we need stronger anti-discrimination legislation to close the loopholes in the Equal Pay Act. The Paycheck Fairness Act, of which I am a proud co-sponsor, passed the House earlier this session and awaits Senate action. It's crucial that we get this bill signed into law so that we can erase pay discrimination against women.
By recognizing the persistence of the problem and taking action, we have the opportunity to make next year's Equal Pay Day a celebration of progress.
If gender inequality "doesn't always benefit the boys" are you saying it benefits the girls? The pink ghetto is better than no ghetto?
In normal circumstances one is expect to make plans to provide for their family if they die suddenly - by whatever means.
It was wrong for the government to decide to pay families just because they were in the Trade Center or on one of the planes. By that logic we should pay the families of folks who died in Katrina.
9/11 produced the biggest knee-jerk in history.
Still no one has answered the question: with all things being equal, if a woman can be hired to do the same work as a man but for less money why would anyone hire men?
The point being that as long as there's more people desiring work than there is jobs, the owners and managers have the advantage, because there's always someone willing to do the job for less. That's why it doesn't pay to rail against such things as afformative action, rather than paying attention to the real issue, which is, are workers being treated justly by the owners of the means of production?
We (workers) are all in the same boat, and are being played against each other. We won't win unless and until we truly unite. . . solidarity is key.
FYI, a study conducted by the American College of Physicians, confirm female internists make less than male internists. We are more likely to be employed by a large group and less likely to work long hours. The pay gap persists despite equal education
As a rather accomplished woman, I can tell you that gender discrimination is real, I have experienced it, and it's rampant and pervasive in the workplace. It's often blatant or barely concealed, and an astonishing amount of the time, those practicing it are completely unaware that's what they are doing, and/or that it's wrong.
If you don't believe me, just do the Tootsie thing and find out for yourself.
Then, unless you're a very unusual-looking man, you'll also probably find out how differently attractive women are treated than the less attractive ones!
We have a President who was raised by a single mother, and whose wife was the majority earner for years, something tells me the speed of change just accelerated.
Our esteemed representative laments that men with children earn more than men without while women with children earn less than women without. A nameless GAO study is referrenced so we can't look up the report ourselves but I speculate that men with children earn more because older men have more children than younger men and older men typically have been employed longer than younger men. Older women generally have more children than younger women as well but unlike men when a child is born the woman must take time off work for the delivery. Women that have no children do not have to take this time off.
This is not a new arguement but since Rep Maloney neglected to address this and pro-actively refute it leads me to believe that this explanation stands a good chance of being the explanation for the discrepency and that Rep Maloney is simply playing to emotions.
The studies that do exactly that show women making within 2% of men. This old "76 cents on the dollar" chestnut is arrived at by ignoring precisely those factors in favor of an hour to hour comparison only.
Until the last 150 years or so ago, most school teachers were male, and not only was the pay was more substantial than it is today, but the profession held in high regard. Women now dominate teaching and we know the rest of the story. Same with the secretarial profession, and with retail clerking jobs.
Now, over half the students in American medical schools are women. I'll give you one guess as to what will happen to doctors' pay within the next few years---not that health care costs don't need to be slashed and that many doctors are overpaid---but I guarantee you, when slashing time finally comes, it will fall disproportionately on the backs of women doctors.