Women’s fair pay fight
Picture this: You’ve worked for a company for 20 years. The company has your loyalty; you are proud to work there. In fact, you are going to retire soon after a lifetime of service and dedication, through good times and bad.
Then one day, you receive an anonymous letter. The letter informs you that your salary is $3,727 a month, and lists the salaries of the other managers, something you would have had no way of finding out about on your own. The next lowest paid manager, who is younger, less experienced, and has been there far less than 20 years, is paid $4,286 a month. The highest paid manager makes $5,236 a month, more than $18,000 more than you per year.
You are horrified, betrayed by the blatant discrimination revealed in the discrepancy. Because the only significant difference between you and your colleagues is that you are a woman. What would you do?
This is the story of Lilly Ledbetter, a grandmother-turned-activist who worked as a supervisor for a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company plant in Alabama for 19 years. She began fighting for the pay she deserved in 1998, more than 10 years ago.
This case isn’t precisely what you’d imagine a discrimination case to be, because it didn’t start out discriminatory. When Ledbetter was first promoted, she was getting the same pay as most of her colleagues. But when her annual review came up, she was given a discriminatory performance evaluation because she was a woman. That performance review determined her next year’s pay. Over 19 years, she was getting minimal raises. It’s like reverse credit card interest.
Ledbetter provided evidence of sex discrimination on her reviews in court, sufficient enough to convince a jury that she deserved $3 million in back pay and damages. But after years of appeals, the Supreme Court decided she wasn’t entitled to any of that.
Their reasoning: She failed to file the charges of pay discrimination within the 180-day filing period of when her company decided to issue her discrepant paycheck.
If you think that is ridiculous, President Barack Obama agrees with you and so does most of Congress. That’s why he signed his first bill into law last Thursday, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which mandates that the 180-day filing period resets every time the company issues a discrepant paycheck. That way, an employee whose pay becomes discrepant over time has a chance to notice what’s going on. It may seem like a no-brainer, especially because in the U.S., it’s inexplicably taboo to discuss your pay with your colleagues, and thus difficult, if not impossible, to discover who is being paid more or less and for what reason.
The act by no means guarantees a reversal in discrimination, but it gives women a chance to notice what’s going on and have their day in court. It also gives companies more motivation to pay their workers equally, rather than pocket the leftovers resulting from prior prejudice.
Ledbetter’s case is inspiring, even though you wouldn’t expect her working experiences would apply to college students and graduates today, many of whom get a straight shot into white collar jobs. But in an interview with Newsweek after the signing, she said something most women would agree with, “I felt that I was born in a good time where women could have good jobs and do jobs that paid better and were not just manual or secretarial or cleaning tables or whatever.”
We all feel that way. This is 2009; we don’t expect employers to pay us less because we’re women. That is the key: We don’t expect it. We don’t go around anticipating being discriminated against because of our gender, and we don’t expect individual acts of discrimination to affect us so profoundly. (Keep in mind, Ledbetter had been receiving $6,000 to 18,000 less per year than she should have been.) So when it does happen, when we are confronted with incontrovertible evidence that women are not seen as equal to their male peers, it’s shocking.
I never plan to be a manager at Goodyear Tire, but I’m relieved that the Ledbetter Act was passed. I don’t expect pay discrimination to affect me, but neither did Ledbetter.
Because of her efforts, if it ever does happen to me, or you, or any woman who genuinely thought she was valued for her skills and abilities, only to find otherwise, the woman will have a chance for justice, however long she may have to struggle for it.
It’s a sad thing to say in the United States of America, a land supposedly built on the ideals of equality, opportunity and judging based on merit. But we’ve never been as equal as we claim; on the Global Gender Gap Index, the U.S. is number 31 out of 168 countries, right between Estonia and Kazakhstan.
Maybe one day, women will actually get what they deserve. We can always hope.
Read the original version of this column online here.
