The Gender Wage Gap: A Civil Rights Issue for Our Time

By MAYA L. HARRIS, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School, and a leading voice in civil rights law. She previously served as Vice President of the Ford Foundation’s global Democracy, Rights and Justice program, and was executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, the largest ACLU affiliate in the United States.

It has been more than 20 years since I arrived at the Stanford Law School campus, a first-year student with dreams of becoming a civil rights lawyer. Like many people of color coming of age in the 1980s, I considered myself a child of the civil rights movement. My mother, a Berkeley activist in the 1960s, raised my sister and me on stories about Medgar, Malcolm, Martin, and Marshall. I was a direct beneficiary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision and busing, of voting rights and affirmative action, so I wanted to use the new body of civil rights law to make secure the change the movement had forged—change that I, having grown up black and South Asian, viewed primarily through the lens of race.

So I’m not sure I would have viewed as a civil rights issue the fact that, in all likelihood, the women in my graduating class and I would wind up earning less than our male counterparts for performing the same legal work—even though many of us would graduate at the top of our class, and all of us, male and female, would earn the same prestigious Stanford Law degree.

But years of working as a civil rights lawyer and advocate have reinforced for me this basic fact: Gender pay inequity is undeniably a pressing civil rights issue for our time.

And the reason this is true emanates from our deepest notions of fairness and equality. When we think about the persistent gender pay gap, it raises in us a discomfort and unease similar to the feeling we get when confronting racial injustice today, all these decades after the civil rights movement. We get that unsettling feeling that, as they say, “for all our hopes and all our boasts,” we still view and value women as “less than.”

Indeed, the core concept of fairness that underlies the pay-inequity discussion animates every equality movement. It is about more than having a comparable paycheck for comparable work, just like the civil rights movement was about more than having racial-equality laws on the books. At its core, pay equity—and the broader idea of women as full participants in the economic life of our country—is about concepts as old as the republic itself. It is about recognizing that we all deserve basic dignity, respect, equal opportunity, and access to economic security.

Jeannie James of Winslow, Arizona, is an administrative assistant at the Department of Social Services. While she loves her job, the long commute makes it difficult to balance work with life at home. {JAN SONNENMAIR}

To be sure, gender equity in general is more of a reality today than ever before. Women attend college at higher rates than men, earn better grades, and graduate in greater numbers. We now make up almost half of the U.S. workforce and are one-third of the nation’s doctors and lawyers—more than triple the number a generation ago. And more than a quarter of wives outearn their spouses today.

But this progress masks deeper wrinkles of inequity. Most of the progress women have made getting up the pay-equity ladder has come for women in the top 20 percent of earners. And studies have shown the wage gap remains true even when we control for factors such as education level, profession, or position, and it cannot be fully explained by personal choices.

Take, for example, doctors in the same specialty performing similar work. According to a study published in 2012 by the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Gender differences in salary exist in this select, homogenous cohort of mid-career academic physicians, even after adjustment for differences in specialty, institutional characteristics, academic productivity, academic rank, work hours, and other factors.”¹ In other words, male doctors earn more than female doctors for the same work.

Pay inequity is particularly salient for women of color, for whom the wage gap is more like a wage gulf, and progress toward closing it remains elusive. The expectation that the wage gap could narrow further in the future—with women now earning the majority of advanced degrees and education beginning to outweigh gender as a determinant of wages—is not a panacea for women of color. They continue to face significant barriers to accessing higher education and, in any event, are more likely to work in minimum- and low-wage jobs.

In the 50 years since the passage of the first Equal Pay Act, the gender wage gap has narrowed by only 18 cents—and more than a quarter of this “progress” is due to losses in men’s wages as opposed to gains in women’s wages. In fact, the reality is that over the past 10 years, the United States has closed its wage gap barely, if at all—by less than one penny—earning the dubious distinction of having one of the largest gender wage gaps among developed nations.

This pay inequity between the sexes carries powerful implications for the health of our economy and the character of our society. It’s no mistake that those who gathered on the National Mall 50 years ago regarded their March on Washington as a march for jobs as much as anything else. The architects of the civil rights movement understood that prohibiting access to economic independence through pay inequity, employment discrimination, and job segregation in low-paying, low-skill occupations was an effective way to keep a segment of the population in a perpetually subservient crouch—just as effective a way as denying them their political rights.

I hear echoes of these same patterns of economic disenfranchisement in the experiences of many women today, and pay inequity is the measurable manifestation of that reality.

It’s time for action—time to bring equality to working women.

There have been many prescriptions offered to address wage inequality between the sexes:

• The Paycheck Fairness Act, languishing in Congress for nearly a decade, would update our laws for the 21st century and help eliminate discriminatory pay.
• Raising the minimum wage would help close the gap, given that nearly two-thirds of all workers making the minimum wage are women.
• Adopting policies that increase access to quality, affordable child care, paid sick days, and family leave would help reduce wage differences in a workforce where women are the sole or primary source of income for 40 percent of households with children under the age of 18.

Just as the concepts of equality, fairness, and access to economic security amplified the moral force of the civil rights movement, so too should these same ideas spur us to address the pay-equity issue with renewed urgency. We cannot wait another 50 years.