Sex Discrimination and the Paycheck Fariness Act
On Equal Pay Day April 24, the Education and Labor Committee held hearings on the Paycheck Fairness Act. April 24 symbolizes the number of days into a year women work before earning what men earned by December 31.
Earlier this year Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. and Rep., Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., introduced the "Paycheck Fairness Act", a bill aiming to reduce the pay gap in several ways. Specifically, this Act would tighten loopholes in existing pay equity law and reinstate the Equal Pay Initiative, proposed in 2000 to dedicate $27 million to teach employers and employees how to recognize and respond to wage discrimination.
The Paycheck Fairness Act would also allow those bringing gender discrimination lawsuits to receive compensatory and punitive damages and require employers to provide pay data broken out by race, sex and national origin.
More than forty years after the Equal Pay Act was signed into law by President Kennedy, women still earn only $.76 cents for every dollar men earn for doing the same work. The pay disparity is even larger among African Americans and Latinos; it affects women at all levels of income and across a wide range of occupations; and the gap widens as women age. To address this problem, which costs families an average of $4,000 a year. This legislation would not only prevent pay discrimination in the first place but provide essential tools to resolve it if it occurs by, among other things:
* Prohibiting employers from punishing employees who share their salary information with their co-workers; (Sharing salary information is often essential for understanding that discrimination exists and addressing it.)
* Toughening the penalties associated with violating the Equal Pay Act;
* Teaching women and girls negotiation skills; (Women are 8 times less likely to negotiate their starting salaries then men and if a woman with a starting salary of $25,000 fails to negotiate for $5,000 more a year, she stands to lose more than $568,000 by age 60.)
* Rewarding model employers; and
* Strengthening the ability of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to crackdown on equal pay violations.
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