Elite female athletes are more than aware of the pay gap between them and their male peers. Just ask anyone in the WNBA.
Today, I want to widen out the lens to the pay inequity faced by women in any and every profession. The good news is that the picture has improved in recent years. The bad news is that only a small subset of women are benefiting.
This year, it’s estimated that women are earning 83 cents for every $1 that men earn, according to Payscale, a company that tracks wage data.
The gap narrows when you compare men and women with similar job titles, education, experience, industry and hours worked. This subset of women earns 99 cents for every $1 men make.
That sounds great, doesn’t it? And it is progress — in the early days of my career the number was 75 cents. But these numbers don’t paint a true picture. Many women aren’t making that 83 cents, let alone the 99 cents.
“Many women and people of color are still segregated into a small number of jobs such as clerical, service workers, nurses, and teachers,” said a spokesperson for the National Committee on Pay Equity. “These jobs have historically been undervalued and continue to be underpaid to a large extent because of the gender and race of the people who hold them.”*
She starts the wheels turning
While there’s still a long way to go, some of the progress that’s been made is due to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. It was the first law President Barack Obama signed when he took office.
In 1979, Lilly Ledbetter took a management job at a Goodyear tire plant in Gadsden, Alabama. She was hired as a supervisor and later promoted to an area manager’s job.
Pay was a taboo subject at the company.
“I was told to never discuss my pay, and if you did discuss your pay, you would no longer work there,” she said. “There was no way to find out where I stood, how I rated according to my peers.”**
But two years before she planned to retire, someone — she doesn’t know who — passed along a note to Lilly with the salaries of the four area managers. She discovered she was being paid thousands less per year than the other three, all of them men.
“It was so devastating. It didn’t just impact my pay, it impacted my overtime, my family and my future,” she said.
Lilly had a 401(k) plan into which she made contributions matched in part by Goodyear. Contribution caps meant that she hadn’t been able to sock away as much as her male peers, so her retirement benefits would be less. The reduced salary also meant that her Social Security benefits were less as well.
Her legacy lives on
All along, Lilly had thought that because of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, she was being paid fairly.
“I was young and naïve when I started at Goodyear,” she said. “I thought I was being paid equally…. Clearly, no one enforced [that law].”
Lilly filed a lawsuit six months before her early retirement in 1998. She won more than $3 million in federal court, but the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ruling. The Supreme Court ruling was canceled out when the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act became law.
The act requires employers to ensure they don’t discriminate in pay practices and that they keep records proving fairness. It allows employees to file lawsuits under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. The act eliminates any filing period, so an employee can at any time challenge her starting or subsequent pay.
Lilly will never see anything from Goodyear for all her years of activism, but still, she feels that she is the victor.
“I’ll be happy if the last thing they say about me after I die is that I made a difference,” she said.***
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* Greg Daugherty, “That women make less than men remains a sad fact in 2021,” Investopedia (January 20, 2021).
** An interview with pay activist Lilly Ledbetter, Tory Burch Foundation. All of her quotes come from this article unless noted otherwise.