Last week, President Obama signed his very first bill and it was on a key economic issue for women – fair pay. What a wonderful and symbolic way to start the new Administration. I am thrilled by all of this.
But, I have to admit that I do have some concerns about our next steps in the fight for equal pay for equal work .
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act reverses a Supreme Court decision from 2007 that ignored decades of legal precedent and closed the courts to women and minorities seeking redress from employees who had discriminated against them. (Please note, in Ledbetter’s case, a lower court found that she had – in fact – been discriminated against. The Supreme Court didn’t disagree with that fact; it just disagreed about when she should have filed the case.)
There are a lot of things to celebrate about the President’s signing of the Ledbetter bill:
- It signals to the country that discrimination against women and any type of wage discrimination will be taken seriously by the Administration.
- It tells the nation that the President understands the concerns of working women and their families and that he is on our side.
- It proves a political theory that I have long believed to be true. Most polls show that fair pay is a top issue for women. Many of us have said that if we can show that government can make a difference in this area, women will vote based on it. President Obama campaigned with Lilly Ledbetter and made this a signature issue of his campaign. And, as we know, many more women voted for him than voted for McCain.
- As a legal matter, the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision needed to be fixed and the law needed to be returned to the pre-2007 standard if our anti-discrimination laws were to have any teeth.
So, why do I have concerns?
We must remember that this bill does not move us forward in our fight for fair wages. It – very necessarily – bring us back to where we were two years ago. And, in 2007, we had not made any real dents in the wage gap for 20 years.
We still have a lot of work to do.
My fear is that – as so often happens in our media age of sound bites – the message that people will take from the press coverage of the bill signing is that this new law solves the problem of the wage gap completely.
It doesn’t.
I am also concerned that when we turn to Congress to address the “nitty gritty” of dealing with the wage gap, they will say, “We’ve already done something on equal pay. You’ve had your day and we have other issues to address.”
And, my final worry is that the tremendous political support for fair wages that was created during the campaign will dissipate now that the Ledbetter bill has been passed.
Now, while public attention is still on the wage gap, we have to start building the case for the measures that are needed to really bring men’s and women’s wages into equity: we need women to be able move from the lowest paying jobs to jobs that allow them to support their families; we need laws that support work-family balance so that working moms are not penalized at the office; and, we need employers to bring transparency to the wages that they pay so that their employees will know if they are being treated unfairly.
I thank President Obama for making fair pay the focus of his first bill signing. And, I salute Lilly Ledbetter for her tremendous courage and effort to make sure other women don’t face the same discrimination that she did.
We must take advantage of the opportunity that they have given us to really create a public conversation on the wage gap. To do anything less would be a failure to honor both of their work.
Sharon Levin is The Women’s Foundation’s director of policy advocacy.
