Revisiting the equal pay issue

In 1975, I landed what seemed at the time to be a good -- though temporary -- job: a position adding spreadsheets for a Cleveland truck axle company. It paid about $8,000 per year.

I was fresh out of college and desperately in need of money to pay the rent in order to stave off a return to my mother's home. My first check for $153 seemed significant -- until I compared my pay with that of a male friend doing similar work for $50 more per week.

It didn't matter that he was working for another firm, or had earned a degree in accounting while I held a bachelor's degree in English literature. Somehow my newfound financial freedom seemed diminished: While he was already making plans to buy a new car later that year, I would still be driving my beat-up Chevy Vega.

Certainly, some of my resentment stemmed from the equal pay campaigns that were waged in the late 1960s and early 1970s at political conventions. My resentment grew after Gloria Steinem appeared at the Case Western Reserve University campus to talk about feminism and other issues of concern to women, including equal pay.

Twenty-five years later, equal pay is just as much an issue as it was back then: Instead of earning 60 cents for every dollar men earned in 1970, women's wages have increased to a mere 74 cents for every dollar paid to a male.

Although women will represent 48 percent of the nation's work force by 2008, the issue of pay inequities is not expected to go away. Over the last decade, the ratio of women's annual pay to men's for full-time, year-round employment increased to 83.8 percent, up from 77.9 percent in the 1990s. But there is still much work to do.

Last year, in a push to help ensure equality in pay, the Clinton administration backed the Paycheck Fairness Act. The act would have permitted the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to collect and monitor information on pay and other forms of compensation from employers based on race, gender, and national origin. It also would levy fines against companies with unequal pay scales. But the administration pulled back the legislation so that a new data collection provision could be inserted. Even so, the measure had no chance of passing in a Republican-controlled Congress.

So, some states are moving ahead on their own.

Vermont, which passed equal pay legislation for some 7,000 state workers in the mid-1980s, decided in 1998 to study pay comparisons among its workers to make sure inequities had not crept back into the system.

Iowa also has decided that female state workers should receive the same wage as their male counterparts. New Jersey is looking at pay among its state workers to determine whether there are any inequities, and so is Maine.

Still, groups like the AFL-CIO are hoping that a measure like the Paycheck Fairness Act will prevail. The measure, sponsored by Sen. Thomas Daschle, a Democrat of South Dakota, and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, would permit the allocation of $10 million to train employers about equal wage laws. An additional $17 million would fund career training centers and apprenticeships in technical and union jobs traditionally held by males.

That makes sense. While some of the wage equity problems women face are because of gender bias, other problems stem from the jobs most women hold. Though women now have access to many more traditionally male-held jobs, many still work part time, or in lower- paying professions. By encouraging women to look at emerging and traditional male professions and by bolstering antidiscrimination statutes, states can move closer to accomplishing what Congress has not.

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