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Floor Speech

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Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, March 14th is Equal Pay Day, marking the number of additional days a woman must work to earn what a man earned the prior year. The 1963 Equal Pay Act (EPA), the first of the great civil rights statutes of the 1960s, has grown creaky with age and needs updating to reflect the new workforce, in which women work as much as men.

What may be the best case for a stronger and updated EPA occurred in Congress in 2003, when female custodians in the House and Senate won an EPA case after showing that female workers were paid a dollar less per hour for doing the same or similar work as male workers. Had those women not been represented by their union, they would have had an almost impossible task in using the rules for bringing and sustaining an EPA class action lawsuit.

My own experience as the first woman to chair the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission afforded me the opportunity to enforce the EPA. However, if women are to get equal pay, they need the Fair Pay Act (FPA). I again introduce this bill on behalf of the average female worker, who is often first steered to, and then locked into, jobs with wages that are deeply influenced by the gender of individuals who have traditionally held such jobs. Much of the wage inequality women experience today is because of employer-steering and deeply rooted wage stereotypes, which result in wages paid according to gender and not according to the skill necessary to do the job. I introduce the FPA because the pay disparity most women face today stems mainly from the segregation of women and men in different jobs and paying women in female-dominated jobs systematically less. Almost half of American women work in just three areas: sales/clerical, service and factories. We need more aggressive strategies to break through the societal barriers present throughout history the world over, as well as employer-steering based on gender, which is as old as paid employment itself.

The FPA would require that if men and women are doing comparable work, they must be paid comparable wages. If a woman, for example, is an emergency services operator, a female-dominated profession, she should not be paid less than a fire dispatcher, a male-dominated profession, simply because each of these jobs has been dominated by one gender. If a woman is a social worker, a traditionally female occupation, she should not earn less than a probation officer, a traditionally male job, simply because of the gender associated with each of these jobs.

The FPA would not tamper with the legal burden. Under the FPA, as under the EPA, the burden would be on the plaintiff to prove discrimination. The plaintiff must show that the reason for the disparate treatment is gender discrimination, not legitimate market factors.

Remedies to achieve comparable pay for men and women are not radical or unprecedented. State governments, in red and blue states alike, have shown that it is possible to eliminate the part of the pay gap that is due to job-steering. Many state governments have adjusted wages for female-dominated professions, raising pay for teachers, nurses, clerical workers, librarians and other female-dominated jobs that paid less than comparable male-dominated jobs. Minnesota, for example, implemented a pay equity plan when it found that traditionally female jobs paid 20 percent less than comparable traditionally male jobs. There may well be some portion of the gender wage gap that is traceable to market factors, but states have shown that you can tackle the gender discrimination-based wage gap without interfering in the market system. States generally have closed the wage gap over a period of four to five years at a one-time cost of no more than three to four percent of payroll.

In addition, many female workers achieve pay equity through collective bargaining, and countless employers provide it on their own as they see women shifting out of vital female-dominated occupations as a result of the shortage of skilled workers, as well as because of the unfairness to women. Unequal pay has been built into the way women have been treated since Adam and Eve. To dislodge such deep-seated and pervasive treatment, we must go to the source, the traditionally female occupations, where pay is linked with gender and always has been.

I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

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