As a recent graduate looking for a job and as a woman, this issue is close to my heart. On average, American women earn 77 cents for every $1 a man makes doing the same work. Now I realize that this figure does not apply to every woman. For example, in my sociology of family class, I learned that unmarried women with no children typically make 95-100% of what a man makes. Not bad. The disparity occurs when women get married or have children. These women are closer to the 77 cent figure than their unmarried, childless counterparts.
At the ripe old age of 21, getting married and having children are far off my radar, but I still find it absolutely ridiculous that the decisions a woman makes in her personal life impact what she gets paid at work.
Some people, we’ll call them male executives, claim that these decisions do have a bearing on a woman’s career. She’ll want maternity leave, she’ll want us to keep her job open, they say. Women, more than men, are forced to balance work and life demands.
Moreover, women struggle to become leaders at work because they are forced to reconcile traditional feminine traits (such as compassion) with leadership traits (assertiveness). Consequently, female leaders are seen as more abrasive than male leaders because they’re challenging traditional ideas about femininity. Hilary Clinton’s crying during the 2008 presidential campaign is a great example of this challenge women face because although she had showed her eloquence and tact throughout the campaign, the media accused her of being too emotional to handle the difficult job of president. Ridiculous, but I digress.
Okay, so the United States has passed legislation that is supposed to prevent pay discrimination including the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. And yet the disparity still exists. What that says to me is that the laws we have in place are ineffective for whatever reason and that additional legislation needs to be passed to correct this inequality.
Sounds pretty logical, right? Well, not to New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte (who, let me point out, is a woman). I’m incredibly disappointed that she voted against the Paycheck Fairness Act. The bill stipulated that employer’s pay decisions must be rooted in legitimate business reasons to pay one employee more than another. Examples include education, training or experience, rather than something completely arbitrary. It also provides protections for women, like preventing employers from taking action employees who try to discover how their pay compares to their colleagues’.
By voting nay to this bill, Ayotte is allowing employers to make arbitrary decisions about how women are paid. She is also limiting female employees from finding out about pay discrepancies at work, which further reduces their power. I suppose as a senator she doesn’t think this issue impacts her personally and thus voted against it. That’s the only explanation I have for her decision to deny the 76.2 million working women (http://www.infoplease.com/spot/womencensus1.html) a chance for a better and more equal workplace.
As a New Hampshire resident, woman and job-seeker, I’m incredibly disappointed at Ayotte’s vote. She is a terrible representative for the United States in general and New Hampshire specifically. I’m embarrassed that she represents my state and I eagerly await the end of her term. Maybe then she’ll have to grapple with this issue herself. Probably not, but I can dream, can’t I?
Twenty-Somethings For a Better America 