Thirty years after Congress passed the Equal Pay Act, women workers have closed one-fourth of the earnings gap that separates them from men.
On June 10, 1963, as he signed the bill into law, President John F. Kennedy said he hoped that the bill - passed after a battle that had lasted 18 years - would "call attention to the unconscionable practice of paying female employees less wages than male employees for the same job."What the law didn't affect was policies such as hiring, promotions and wages for people in unequal jobs. In the 30 years since then, it has had only minor effects on the relative economic status of women and men.
Back then, when the pay and benefits of full-time, year-round employees of all races was compared, the typical woman made 59 cents for every dollar earned by a man. By 1991, she was making nearly 70 cents.
"Being 30 percent behind after 30 years is not great," said Susan Bianchi-Sand, executive director of the National Committee on Pay Equity. "At this rate, it will take us another 90 years to have equal pay."
The earnings gap remains widest for women in the nation's largest minority groups. For every dollar earned by white men working full time year round in 1991, median earnings were: black men, 73 cents; white women, 69 cents; Hispanic men, 65 cents; black women, 62 cents, and Hispanic women, 54 cents.
Nevertheless, the anniversary of the breakthrough will be celebrated Thursday by Bianchi-Sand's committee - a coalition of 173 labor, women's, church and human rights groups seeking fair pay for women and minorities. At their daylong session they'll also plan what comes next in the series of anti-bias moves that began with the 1963 act.
The law was "necessary, though not sufficient," said Leslie Wolfe, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Women Policy Studies. She described the law as flawed and poorly enforced.
The Equal Pay Act of 1963 required that women and men receive equal pay for jobs that require "equal skill, effort and responsibility," but only if they worked under similar conditions in the same workplace. It said pay couldn't be equalized by lowering pay for men.
Because a stronger version stalled in Congress in 1962, the 1963 act was pared down to exclude part-timers, managers, supervisors, professionals, temporaries and anyone who worked in a home, farm, hospital, restaurant or hotel or on an elected public official's office staff.
Most, though not all, of those workers were covered many years later, but at the start only 7 million of 25 million women workers were protected.
"The law has been very important in empowering women," said Nancy Davis, executive director of Equal Rights Advocates, a non-profit public interest law firm in San Francisco. "Those who went before us courageously filed suits that the rest of us don't necessarily have to bring. So we can go after the more subtle and sophisticated techniques."
The trend toward equal pay has aided women workers, the families they help support, the employers who found that higher pay decreased turnover, and the economy in which the women spend their pay.
Yet a national survey conducted jointly by Democratic and Republican polling firms before last year's election showed that 75 percent of working women, 72 percent of homemakers and 60 percent of men agree that women are still paid "less fairly" than men.
The Equal Pay Act provided wronged workers with $20 million a year in back pay and other awards in its first decade, but in the 1980s that dropped to less than $2 million annually. Last year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Com-mission dismissed most complaints and filed only two equal-pay court suits against employers.
"This is a giant mega-copout of the worst order," said Judy Lichtman, executive director of the Washington-based Women's Legal Defense Fund. "The fact of the matter is they've stopped looking for violations or encouraging people to bring them in."
Today's employers favor equal pay for equal work, said Peter Edie, a labor relations specialist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which led the fight against the act.
"A simple comparison of female wages with male wages isn't accurate," Edie said. "Of course, they make less. More of them work in less well-paid job classifications."
Labor Department statistics do show that women are three times more likely to be hired for and work in low-wage jobs than men of equal education, training, work experience and skills.
One reason: The three wide fields in which six out of every 10 women work - sales, office staff, and food, health, cleaning and personal services - pay most workers less than fields such as crafts, manufacturing jobs, management, professions and trucking, which employ the bulk of the men.
Another reason: Even within the same occupations, women get less pay. A study by the Labor Department found only one occupation (mechanics and repairers) in which women's median earnings were higher than men's. The women's edge was 2.8 percent, but they held less than 4 percent of those jobs.
The study found 58 other occupations in which women made at least 80 percent as much as men. For example, women earned 3 percent less among table-clearers, 4 percent less among elementary teachers, 6 percent less among cashiers, 10 percent less among registered nurses, 15 percent less among social workers, 17 percent less among dispatchers and bartenders, and 19 percent less among stock handlers and baggers.
"The Equal Pay Act alone can never achieve wage equity for women because women aren't always in the same identical job with men," said Carolin Head, assistant policy director of the American Association of University Women. She said education, recruiting, hiring, training, promotion and assessment of how much a job is worth should also be bias-free.
One way or another, pay for women and minorities will continue to get better, predicted Bianchi-Sand.
"Now that 53 percent of the work force consists of women and people of color, it's clear that pay equity isn't a special-interest issue," she said. "Unless the wage gap shrinks and we pay for the value of their work, we're not going to have a healthy economy over all."
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(Chart)
THE EARNINGS GAP: WOMEN MAKE LESS
Women's median earnings as a percent of men's
Hourly Weekly Annual
1979 64.1% 62.5% 59.7%
1980 64.8 64.4 60.2
1981 65.1 64.6 59.2
1982 67.3 65.4 61.7
1983 69.4 66.7 63.6
1984 69.8 67.8 63.7
1985 70.0 68.2 64.6
1986 70.2 69.2 64.3
1987 72.1 70.0 65.2
1988 73.8 70.2 66.0
1989 75.4 70.1 68.7
1990 76.8 71.8 71.6
1991 77.5 74.0 69.9
1992 79.4 75.4 n.a.
Source: Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor.
Annual figures: Pay and benefits for those who work fulltime year round.
Weekly figures: Adds those who work fulltime only part of the year.
Hourly figures: Adds those who work only part-time.
THE MINORITY GAP: WOMEN MAKE LESS
Median annual earnings of fulltime year round workers in 1991.
White men $30,266 (100%)
African American men $22,075 (73%)
White women $20,794 (69%)
Hispanic men $19,771 (65%)
African American women $18,720 (62%)
Hispanic women $16,244 (54%)
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics; Institute for Women's Policy Research.
THE AGE GAP: WOMEN MAKE LESS
Median annual earnings of fulltime year round workers in 1991.
Age Group Women Men
25-34 $20,592 $25,894
35-44 $22,336 $32,662
45-54 $21,798 $36,146
55-64 $19,642 $32,108
Source: Census Bureau; Institute for Women's Policy Research.
THE EDUCATION GAP: WOMEN MAKE LESS
Median annual earnings of fulltime year round workers in 1991.
Men with graduate degree $40,002
Men with bachelor's degree $39,894
Women with graduate degree $33,122
Women with bachelor's degree $27,654
Men with high school diploma $26,218
Women with high school diploma $18,042
Source: Census Bureau; Institute for Women's Policy Research.
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