(HOST) Today is Equal Pay Day, and commentator Mary Claire Carroll will join thousands of women in Vermont and across the country working to raise awareness about gender based wage discrimination.
(CARROLL) I was eleven when President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963. The legislation provided equal pay for equal work for women in the workforce. Back then women made fifty-nine cents for every dollar a man made.
A picture of that historic event shows the handsome President surrounded by women of varying ages dressed in the pillbox hats of the time and wearing white gloves. Some of these women belonged to Business and Professional Women USA, BPW for short, an organization formed in 1919 to fight against gender based wage discrimination. For these working-women, the signing of the Equal Pay Act was an exciting moment of promise and the culmination of many years of advocacy and education.
One year later, the Civil Rights Bill passed. Title VII of that legislation banned wage discrimination based on gender.
When I joined BPW in 1985 the wage gap stood at 64.6 cents to a dollar. In 1996 BPW made a decision to pursue equal pay legislation in Vermont. We formed a coalition with the Vermont Commission on Women, and the Attorney General’s office, and began working to raise awareness and craft legislation.
Vermont’s Equal Pay for Equal Work Act passed in April 2002, and it applies to all Vermont employees. Prior to 2002 only Vermont employees working for companies larger than fifty employees were covered under the Federal Equal Pay Act. In 2002 the national wage gap stood at seventy-six percent.
Passage of the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act was an exciting milestone. But Vermont advocates had one more protection to secure to make this legislation more effective. We needed to remove secrecy around wages. The question we asked was, How do you know if you are being paid inequitably if you can’t talk about your wages with co-workers?
In April 2005, the legislature passed H.72 that now is part of Section 8 of the Vermont Fair Employment Practices Act.
It says that Vermont employees can disclose and discuss their wages without fear of discipline, discharge, or retaliation. Employers cannot require employees to sign a wage non-disclosure agreement or make it a condition of employment.
Legislation is now in place that should help close the wage gap in Vermont, but stereotypes about the value of women’s work persist. Women must learn to negotiate for higher salaries, to know their rights as employees, and to speak out for themselves. Employers must base their wage setting policies on skill level, education, responsibilities, and experience. Not gender.
Mary Claire Carroll is a long time advocate for working women and a member of the Vermont Commission on Women.