[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 4]
[House]
[Pages 5140-5142]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              WOMEN'S PAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Radel). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton) for 30 minutes.
  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I rushed to get to the floor before the 
gavel went down this afternoon because this is the week which marks 
when women had to work as long as men work in order to get the pay that 
is equivalent to the pay of men during the 12 months of 2012. Notice 
what month we are in. This is April. So we're talking about four-plus 
months beyond the 12 months that a man had to work in order to have the 
same salary--it takes a woman 16 months plus.
  But it was not that alone, Mr. Speaker. There are figures I 
discovered in doing some research. And, of course, there is the 
pressure, I think, all of us should feel if Congress has anything to 
add to this discussion that would move what appears to be a ``no-
forward'' position for women's pay in the workforce in at least the 
last 10 years. There are pending before the Congress at least two 
bills. There is a petition, a discharge petition, that is already up to 
compel the House to vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act. That act has not 
moved forward in the House, although it has been filed for a number of 
years. But I believe the most recent data would compel everyone to 
believe if there is anything this House can do, this is the time to do 
it.
  I looked at what progress women have made since I chaired the Equal 
Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) beginning in the late 1970s, 
with never a thought that I'd be a Member of the House of 
Representatives. I've looked at the decade of the 1980s. That's about 
the time I left the EEOC, and what I found then was steady, yes, 
incremental, but steady progress; moving, for example, from 60.2 
percent in 1980 to 69.9 percent, so that means about 10 percentage 
points movement in 10 years.
  But then I looked at the years beginning in 1990 until today, and it 
appears to be taking women twice as long to move the distance during 
this latter 20-year period than it took during the 10-year period 
beginning in 1980. That ought to make all of us stop and wonder what is 
at work.
  If we look at 1990, when we looked like we were solidly into the 70s, 
that is women making 70 percent, the exact figure was 71.6 percent of 
what men earned, that figure gradually went up. You get to 2000, from 
1990, and women have gone only from essentially about 70 percent, 
exactly 71.6 percent, to 73.7 percent. The rate is what has slowed, but 
even more seriously, 77 appears to be the unlucky number for women's 
pay in our country because women have been at 77 percent, sometimes 77 
percent and a little more, but basically 77 percent of what a man earns 
since 2005.

                              {time}  1420

  What that means is no progress whatsoever.
  Incremental progress was never enough, particularly when you consider 
that more women today work than men. But the slow pace of growth, 
compared to many past years, is unacceptable.
  What is the reason for this?

[[Page 5141]]

  The most recent data shows an actual widening of the gap between men 
and women in wages. For example, in 2012, women who worked full-time--
now we're talking about full-time workers--earned 80.9 percent, almost 
81 percent, of what men earned. That was in terms of weekly pay. But 
that was a drop of more than two percentage points from the year 
before, 82.2 percent.
  Now, these are full-time women's earnings at a time when women 
considerably outrank men in the number who graduate from college, for 
example.
  The annual earning look even worse, because that's where the 77 
percent figure comes in, where women lagged even further behind if you 
look annually, and there you get 77 percent of what men earned 
annually. That becomes a figure that we almost know by heart. That's a 
figure that we ought to know for only one year.
  If you want to see what that means in dollars and cents, a woman who 
works full-time averaged $691 a week in 2012. That was less than she 
had earned in 2011.
  Now, men's earnings in that same week were $854. That's compared to 
$691 for a woman. What is most important is not the difference in the 
men's and women's pay, but that men had a small gain over what they had 
earned in 2011, whereas women were going in the opposite direction.
  As we looked at why this would occur, I looked further into where are 
the jobs. Why not look at the job growth; perhaps we're not seeing 
growth in women's occupations.
  And one of the great problems, of course, with women's pay is that, 
although they are graduation from college, women are still employed 
largely in stereotypic women's jobs. And these jobs have been women's 
for so long that they are labeled as women's jobs, and they have 
acquired a wage of their own that reflects discrimination against 
women.
  Job growth, if we look at it during the last year, has been in 
retail, in catering, and in minimum-wage jobs. That, in and of itself, 
of course, may tell us why women's wages have not been growing at the 
rate we would like.
  Women are preparing themselves in other fields; but very often, when 
we talk about women's wages, we are not talking about the average 
woman. And since that average woman's wage is essential for family 
earnings today, we've got to look at who we're talking about.
  The Paycheck Fairness Act is so modest that it doesn't even pretend 
to go at this entire problem, but it is the kind of bill that you would 
think we would have a bipartisan majority for. The Paycheck Fairness 
Act, which we're trying to get out of the House, simply updates the 
Equal Pay Act, which it was my honor to enforce as chair of the EEOC.
  The so-called EPA, or Equal Pay Act, was the first of the Civil 
Rights Acts, and it guarantees equal pay for equal work, the kind of 
guarantee that, if you asked every 100 Americans if they were for equal 
pay for equal work, you would find 99.9 percent of them would say they 
were, and any falling off of that, whatever it would be would be 
because they didn't understand the question.
  But we are talking about a bill that was passed more than, well, now, 
50 years ago, and you can imagine that it does not fully meet today's 
economy. The modest changes involved, to allow class actions, for 
example, are to ensure that a woman could discuss her wages without 
being fired.
  Today, if you discuss your wages openly, there's nothing to protect 
you against being let go. You can see secrecy in wages is part and 
parcel of the problem.
  Women's wages, of course, have suffered, particularly in this 
recession, also because a disproportionate number of public jobs have 
not come back, as we see teachers being laid off, for example. We see 
social workers being laid off. And you're going to see more of that 
because of the sequester.
  The sequester is going to be handed down in programs to states and 
cities, and it means that the programs that were available are not 
going to be readily available, and you will begin to see these women's 
jobs suffer even more.
  I am very concerned that we have been looking at what progress women 
have been making, without noting that they have been making no 
progress, and that is the problem I see.
  I don't pretend that any one statute will make that progress occur. I 
do understand that there is a set of related phenomena involved here, 
but I do not believe we can leave on the table our responsibility for 
moving to do what we can, as women become not only equal in the 
workforce, but often the majority.
  It is men who are opting out of the workforce, and some of them can 
opt out because they have pensions. Some of them are opting out because 
they go on disability from having worked. Women seem not to be opting 
out, but opting in.
  The Paycheck Fairness Act gives some muscle to the old Equal Pay Act. 
In some ways, it's fallen into a certain amount of disuse because it 
doesn't meet all that is needed today. It's still, of course, an 
important statute; but it remains a statute that, like any of our civil 
rights statutes, needs to be looked at often to see in what ways it can 
be improved.
  In addition to the Paycheck Fairness Act, with Senator Harkin I have 
sponsored the Fair Pay Act. That act differs from the very important 
Paycheck Fairness Act because it seeks to get at a rudimentary problem 
in the workforce, and that is that women are captured in women's 
occupations that, by their very nature, have built-in discrimination.
  For example, two-thirds of white women and three-quarters of African 
American women work in just three areas of the economy: clerical, 
service, and factory jobs.

                              {time}  1430

  It will take a more aggressive strategy to break through the old, 
even ancient habits of the workplace that have been there since women 
began to work. We have steered women into women's jobs. The Fair Pay 
Act looks at jobs which are comparable but are not paid comparably and 
would require that they be paid in that way. There may not be a huge 
number of such jobs, but the States have often found such jobs and 
sometimes have made them comparable in pay. Often at the urging of 
trade unions, studies that have made it clear that you can make 
comparable pay adjustments where you can prove that the reason that 
jobs which are different but comparable and are not paid the same is 
because of discrimination--and that's what'd a woman would have to 
show--women's wages can, in fact, make up for the disparity over a 
period of time, as a number of States have done, simply by spreading 
change in pay over a period of time until the goal of equal pay is 
reached.
  It is one thing to mark this week as a week where women are still at 
77 percent; it's quite another to make clear that that 77 percent is a 
figure we've been stuck on now, with absolutely no movement, for more 
than 10 years. The Paycheck Fairness Act, moving it with a discharge 
petition, as we're trying to do, to at least force a vote on it, would 
make people think about the figures I have just discussed; because if 
they think about them, I think most Members would want to do something 
about them.
  We are not preparing women for the inevitable retirement that will 
come without pensions and with too little pay. The more their pay 
begins to reflect the pay of what is often their mate's, who graduated 
from high school or college at about the same time, with comparable 
skills, the greater will be women's security as they age and will 
reduce the call on taxpayers to take care of them.
  It was with great pride that I chaired the Equal Employment 
Opportunity Commission in the late 1970s and saw some progress that 
began to be made in the seventies and eighties. There's no reason for 
the slowdown that women have been stuck on at 77 percent even before 
the recession. It is not the Great Recession that has set women back; 
it is the failure in legislation and it is the failure in the 
workplace, itself, to treat women's pay as the equivalent of the pay of 
men.

[[Page 5142]]

  I hope women will not be discouraged as they now are finishing high 
school and college in greater numbers and at a greater rate than their 
male counterparts. We can only hope they will not be discouraged when 
they see that their pay does not, in fact, equal what their education 
forecasts.
  During this week when we noted that it took women 16-plus months to 
earn what a man earned in 12 months, I ask that we look behind these 
numbers and put a face on them. Because the face is the woman who lives 
next door; the face is your wife; the face is your daughter who is 
going to come out of college now loaded, as most of them are today, 
with their education having been secured through loans. They want to 
maximize the time, effort, energy, and ambition that goes into pursuing 
education, regardless of gender, so that they can begin to move at 
least incrementally again.
  Women have been more than aware that their own progress has come 
slowly. They are not content to make no progress. But, if we look at 
the last 12 years, essentially, what we see is no progress. I'm not 
sure what kind of a goal to put on progress that should be made. I can 
only look at the decade when some considerable progress was made and 
when 10 percentage points of progress was made over 10 years, to say if 
we could do that once, we surely should be able to do it again. A place 
to begin would be to sign the discharge petition so that the Paycheck 
Fairness Act could be brought to the floor. It needs 218 signatures. It 
currently has 192 cosponsors. There may be more by this point.
  We have to focus on taking action. Individual women, perhaps, will be 
taking such action in their own workplaces. The whole notion of lean 
in--that is, to go in and ask for the pay that you're entitled to--is a 
step that I would, of course, advise. But I recognize that an endemic 
problem in women's progress across the board calls for more than 
individual action.
  As we mark, as we usually do in April, the time in months it has 
taken for women to achieve what men have achieved in far less time--and 
this time 4 months more to earn what a man earned in 12 months--I hope 
that that figure, at a time when women's pay is stuck at 77 percent or 
so as it has been for 10 or 12 years now, that we will be inclined to 
use this week not to commemorate, not even to just recognize, but to be 
activated to move women whose incomes are vital not only to their own 
families, but to our country. If we do that, then by the time we reach 
this point perhaps next April, we will have a different story to tell.
  I am pleased to yield back the remainder of my time.

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