As I step upon my soap box, allow me to provide the following disclosure: I am a man.
That said, I am a staunch Feminist. Meaning: I think women should be treated equally with men, in all areas. This includes payment for services rendered. It should be about the job, not the genitals.
Which is why, in mid-2007, I am so very dismayed at this story in The New York Times. If you don’t want the hassle of having to subscribe to the website, let me break the article down for you: The Supreme Court of The United States ruled against a woman who had thick evidence that her employer (Goodyear Tire) wasn’t paying her the same as her male counterparts. Why did they rule against her? Because it had been twenty years since her pay was set. In other words, the high court said that if you don’t file suit against your employer for discrimination in the first 180 days, you’re out of luck. Too bad that almost all workplaces enforce secrecy on wage amounts. Too bad if it takes you a while to catch on to the pay inequity at your workplace. Too bad it takes you time to figure out what to do. Too bad it takes you some more time to get up the courage to go after your employer in court. Too bad.
Too bad for families is what this is about. Creating a strict federal time-line for receiving aid from the government sets a bad precedent, allowing pay discrimination to continue, which means that families will continue to have to have two wage-earners instead of one, because the female wage-earner may not make enough on her own. And with two wage-earners, parenting becomes an understandable secondary priority.
And what happens to these kids who don’t get the attention they need? Well, jails and drug rehabs are filled with these kids, who become a burden on the entire community. How does putting a statute of limitations on such a wide-spread social injustice do anything but harm us?
Remember the words of Simone de Beauvoir: “Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male’s superiority.”
[tags]opinion, op ed, editorial, news, pay inequity, wages, woman, women, feminism, family, families, fairness, equality[/tags]
Photo graciously provided by sveeta, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved
1 response so far ↓
Tere // Jun 5, 2007 at 7:19 am
Great post, Stu. As a working mom, I worry about this, about the day this will catch up to me and I’ll be that woman with X years of experience earning considerably less than the man who does similar work for more pay (perhaps it’s happening already and I just haven’t found out).
Pay discrimination is high on my list as a reason why I’m trying to work for myself or find an alternative to what I’ve got now. I can’t come to terms with the thought of busting my butt for a corporation (or society) that automatically assumes I’m inferior to men, in skills and pay.
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