The twenty-first century has served as the era in which women are identified as equal to men in all areas of social policy; however, women today receive less income than men with the same job and same employer. To most, this wage gap is startling since Americans today grow up with the notion that both men and women are to be treated as equals and have the same abilities as the other. Yet, employers still pay women less and more often than not, economically and socially penalize women who also serve as caregivers. Women who are pregnant or have children tend to not only be paid less, but are discriminated against and deemed less competent because of their caregiving duty. Furthermore, the gap is more astounding when cases of women who have earned a higher degree than a male still get paid less for doing the same work and are less likely to be promoted to a higher position solely based on the discrimination of the employee being a woman.
Women today need to be aware of the inequality occurring in the everyday workplace and must be aware of their rights. Take a look at some of these cases to better understand your right to equal pay…
In the Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company case occurring in 2006, an employee of management for nineteen years, Lily Ledbetter, discovered that she was receiving less money than a male coworker who was in the same position of leadership that she was. After realizing the unequal pay, Ledbetter filed a sex discrimination case against Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company and won her case. However, she soon lost her case in an appeal because she was unaware of the fact that one has to file a case within 180 days of one’s first unequal paycheck. As one may assume, the general United States population was an uproar after this ruling of gender discrimination and quickly the Lily Ledbetter Act of 2009 was drawn up, which was signed by President Obama as an executive order in 2014. The executive order and act rewrote the law so that with every new paycheck, someone had 180 days from that date to file a lawsuit. These corrections made it possible for women to have a respectful amount of time to prepare and develop a case as well as combat one of the loopholes not filled in the 1963 Equal Pay Act.
Soon after in 2011, a fifty-four year old woman by the name of Betty Dukes, who was an employee at Wal-Mart for six years, claimed that after amazing performance reviews she was denied the training to advance to a leadership job that other men with the same accolades were being trained for. So, Dukes filed a class action lawsuit that emphasized that the company’s policies upheld lower pay for women in similar positions and a delayed promotion time. The class Dukes claimed to represent was more than 1.5 million women employed by Wal-Mart, which the circuit courts under Rule 23(b) of the federal rules of civil procedure were too unmanageable and expensive of a size. However, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court order and supported Dukes claim that Wal-Mart engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination.