Equal Pay for Women in Jeopardy with Paycheck Fairness Act Defeat
By Christina Madison, staff writer, political columnist – December 1, 2010
It is hard to fathom even after all this time that women are still fighting for equal pay. It is even harder to fathom that through the many years of heartbreak and nearly a century of fighting for the right to vote, we don’t even have the basic, fundamental right to get paid equally – even in 2010?
Women now comprise half of the paid workforce, and many are finding themselves as their family’s breadwinner, therefore making pay equality more imperative under today’s economic circumstances. Women with MBAs who make the same “life choices” as a man – delaying or denouncing parenthood, gaining the same education and being on the same track – are still earning $4,600 less than their male counterparts straight out of school, according to a survey from Catalyst.
On Nov. 17, an effort to actually make women’s equality a reality and finally close the gap on gender wage wars was pushed back when the Senate blocked and stonewalled the Paycheck Fairness Act with the final vote of 58-41. The Senate needed 60 votes to demolish the filibuster. It was especially disappointing after its prior victory in January of 2009 when the bill passed in the House of Representatives under the leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, receiving solid bipartisan votes of 256-163.
How would the Paycheck Fairness Act help women in the workforce and why would it have been important? First, it would have been an effective tool to eliminate an omission in the rules that allows circumvention in the Equal Pay Act of 1963. It would have created incentives for employers to follow the new law, therefore strengthening the Equal Pay Act of 1963. It could have helped many women negotiate better wages and even promotions.
The act would have a checks and balance system that would have researched more into the how’s and why’s of the wage gap and would have ensured that businesses were compliant with the law. Importantly, it could have protected many women from workplace retaliation pertaining to when differences of pay have been revealed to have recourse in class action sex-based lawsuits.
Women’s organizations across the country fear that this vote will be a reflection on the next two years, where they believe women’s right will continue to be attacked. But one must not take this as an ultimate defeat, but to rise above and continue with what is right as women did during Women’s Suffrage Movement.
Women are still wading in seas of contradiction, where a woman can enlist in the Army and also be a mother, where a woman can be a Speaker of the House, a doctor, a lawyer, a religious leader, but never a priest and not yet a president. Women have experienced the breadth of freedom, yet are contained in invisible borders that continue to limit them. The Paycheck Fairness Act is one of those invisible borders.
The Nov. 17 vote begs to ask why people fear so much that women will be paid equally. It seems that many misnomers and misconceptions of the act are bumping around, such as that the act will actually give women power to fight for what’s fair, and that, my friend, is the bottom line – feels like a flashback, does it not?
Sources
1) http://www.nationalpartnership.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=26751
2) http://blog-aauw.org/2010/10/22/tough-economy/
4) http://www.the-spearhead.com/2010/11/18/senate-republicans-block-paycheck-fairness-act/
5) http://blog-aauw.org/2010/11/18/denied-my-rights/
6) http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/22/why-women-need-the-paycheck-fairness-act.html
7) http://womenshistory.about.com/od/suffrage1900/a/august_26_wed.htm
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