[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 53 (Tuesday, April 14, 2015)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E482]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                INTRODUCTION OF THE FAIR PAY ACT OF 2015

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                       HON. ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON

                      of the district of columbia

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, April 14, 2015

  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, today is Equal Pay Day, which marks the 
number of additional days a woman must work to earn what a man earned 
by the end of last 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 almost 
as much as men. Every Congress, Representative Rosa DeLauro and I, 
along with scores of other members of Congress, introduce the Paycheck 
Fairness Act, to amend the EPA to make its basic procedures equal to 
those of other anti-discrimination statutes. As an original cosponsor, 
I attended the signing of the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which 
restored the original interpretation following a Supreme Court decision 
that limited lawsuits on pay disparity by tightening the time frame to 
file such cases.
  The best case for a stronger and updated EPA, with at least the 
Paycheck Fairness Act, occurred here in the 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 for doing the same or 
similar work as men. Had these 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 suit.
  Based on my own experience as the first woman to chair the Equal 
Employment Opportunity Commission, I again introduce the Fair Pay Act 
(FPA) 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 those who have traditionally held such 
jobs. Much of the wage inequality women experience today is because of 
employer-steering and because of deeply rooted wage stereotypes, which 
result in wages being paid according to gender and not according to the 
skills and efforts necessary to do the job. I introduce the FPA because 
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. Two-thirds of white women and three quarters 
of African-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 requires that if men and women are doing comparable work, 
they are to 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 sex. 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, like the EPA, will not tamper with the legal burden. Under 
the FPA, as under the EPA, the burden will 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 
demonstrated with their own employees that they can eliminate the part 
of the pay gap that is due to discrimination. Twenty states 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 a gender 
wage gap that is traceable to market factors, but twenty 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 routinely 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.

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