Equal Pay Can’t Wait

Seven years ago, President Obama signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act ensuring that anyone whose pay lagged because of gender, race, age, disability, or religion could assert her rights under federal anti-discrimination laws. While the act has helped many deserving individuals since its enactment, according to the National Women’s Law Center, women remain economically marginalized and underpaid in comparison with men throughout the United States and here in New Jersey.

Enter New Jersey legislative champion state Senator Loretta Weinberg introducing a critical measure to help address the persistent problem of pay inequity that hurts New Jersey families so dramatically. Sen. Weinberg’s bill takes steps towards strengthening New Jersey’s laws against discrimination particularly as it relates to wages and sex. A requirement for employers contracting with the state to provide demographic and wage information is a good measure to help identify discriminatory practices where they exist. This measure and corresponding initiatives in other states need to be supported with advocacy and activism to move them through attempts to derail and obstruct.

Legislative measures are one tool in what must be a multi-faceted approach to the persistent problem of the gender pay gap.

Our unions continue to advocate successfully for equal pay and make some progress. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that women represented by labor unions earn 88.7 cents on the dollar compared with their male counterparts, a considerably higher earnings ratio than the earnings ratio between all women and men in the United States (78.3 percent).

When I started teaching more than three decades ago, the profession was low-paid and comprised of a mostly female workforce. We suffered with low salaries for decades. Collectively bargained salary guides accounting for both experience and education have gone a long way towards addressing pay inequality within the ranks of professional educators, but it is still not enough. Unfortunately old attitudes persist and we still see that men are more likely to be moved into athletics coaching and extracurricular activities that offer stipends and more likely to be hired into district administration with higher salaries.

Although we know that education is a great equalizer in many areas and of immeasurable value in shaping our society, the wage gap exists regardless of education level. Women with master’s degrees working full time are paid just 72 cents for every dollar paid to men with master’s degrees, according to the National Partnership for Women and Families Further, women with doctoral degrees are paid less than men with master’s degrees, and women with master’s degrees are paid less than men with bachelor’s degrees.

None of these persistent gaps are going to be closed by the force of wishful thinking or platitudes. We need solid legislation like Sen. Weinberg’s to keep us moving in the right direction. We need programs to train women for rewarding careers in trades as well as for professional and managerial roles. We need to change the mistaken impression that males are family breadwinners and women are only working to supplement a husband’s income. In fact, census data show more than 441,000 family households in New Jersey headed by women. About 23 percent of those families, or 99,308 family households, have incomes that fall below the poverty level.

One strength we have in advocating for local, state and federal legislation is that women vote at higher rates than men since 1980 and in higher numbers since 1964. In 2012, 71.4 million women (64 percent of those eligible) voted, compared to 61.6 million men (less than 60 percent). In 2012, 81.7 million women were registered to vote, compared to 71.4 million men.

Legislators of both parties as well as candidates for higher office should be held to task for their past votes and asked to pledge to support bills that provide accountability and address wage discrimination. These are among the tools that we can use so that subsequent generations of Lilly Ledbetter’s daughters and nieces earn enough to be self-sufficient and those who choose to can care for their own families.

Donna M. Chiera is the president of the American Federation of Teachers New Jersey.