May 16, 2018 • 25 mins
There was a brief moment 150 years ago when it looked like women might get equal pay for equal work. But they didn’t—and that set the standard for decades to come. On this episode of the Pay Check, Rebecca Greenfield revisits a Civil War-era sex scandal that set the stage for the pay gap debates we're having right now. She talks to Claire Suddath about how a century of rules and laws saying what women can and can’t do have made it easy for companies to pay women less.
One big reason the gender pay gap still exists is because of a phenomenon called "occupational sorting"— the idea that some jobs are dominated by women, and those jobs often pay less. That didn't just happen. Claire and Rebecca sort through how history determined the market value for women. Then Claire talks with Lilly Ledbetter, whose fight for gender equality at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. seemed like an open and shut case—until a loophole in the law denied her justice.
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
The first equal paid debate in the US started way
back in the eighteen sixties, and it ended in the
most American of ways, with a sex scandal. It was
a huge It was a huge scandal. That's Jessica Zappero.
She wrote This Grand Experiment, a book about when women
first went to work in the federal government in eighteen
(00:28):
sixty one, at the start of the Civil War. The
government is running out of money to pay federal workers.
It needs cheap labor. The Treasure of the US at
the time is Francis Spinner, and he has this great
idea higher women. When he went and inspected the treasury,
he found men performing tasks that he thought were better
suited to and more cheaply performed by women. Spinner is
(00:52):
trying to keep costs down, so he goes out and
offers women six hundred dollars a year for these jobs,
half of what the met are making. It's the first
time the government hires women, and it's a big opportunity.
He gets tons of applicants. At first, women are happy
to have the jobs, but even then d C was
(01:14):
an expensive place to live, and they soon start agitating
for more money. They petitioned Congress. They write letters to
newspapers like this one, which ran in the New York
Times in early eighteen sixty nine. Very few persons denied
a justice of the principle that equal work should command
equal pay without regard to the sex of the labor.
(01:36):
But it is one thing to acknowledge the right of
a principle, and quite another to practice it. Women are
known to be as good printers, teachers, telegraph clerks, etcetera.
As men, but fewer occupations are open to them. Their
necessity for employment is greater. Therefore their services can be
obtained for less. They say, we're doing the same job.
(01:56):
It's galling to watch men continue to get raises when
they're already earning so much and we're doing the exact
same job. Why are we different? What makes us to
differ from them? It's a reasonable question, and Congress doesn't
dismiss them. By eight seventy a handful of bills have
been introduced that would give women equal pay for equal work.
(02:17):
The US government had officially taken up the equal pay debate.
This is where that sex scandal comes in. It's the
first time men and women are working together, and while
there's some romance. A few relationships become public and it's
a huge deal. Newspapers cover it, politicians talk about it.
(02:41):
It's so notable that guide books to DC make sure
visitors know about it. It's impossible to tell how many
of these female clerks are pure women or how many impure.
The black sheep are greatly in the minority, but are
still believed to be numerous. It's delicious gossip, and it
(03:03):
creates this idea that women working at the Treasury get
paid not to do clerical work, but to be sexually
available to men. Essentially, as far as some people are concerned,
this is government sanctioned prostitution. As Congress is debating equal pay,
one faction brings those up. You have been saying, we
shouldn't be employing women at all. They're all prostitutes. Why
(03:26):
are we even talking about this. We should just fire
all of them. None of the equal pay bills pass,
and it's partly because of this thinking. This is really significant.
It sets the standard for the next hundred fifty years.
This is how women enter the professional workforce from their
private companies also start to hire women to do clerical work,
(03:47):
and taking a queue from the government, they pay them less,
and perhaps had the federal government equally rewarded male and
female labor at this point, maybe private labor would have
paid them better as well. But instead Congress sent this
clear mess age that it was acceptable to treat women
as exploitable and marginal employees and to women themselves that
they were fundamentally inferior to men. When you look at
(04:13):
the world, you know what the population like. Where is
our place like? Where is our value? Wodn deserve people
for equal work? The gender lie helps to keep women
not on a pedestal but in a cage. First, have
you've done for the women according to the promises of
the platform. I'm sure we haven't done enough. And then
(04:33):
I'm glad that you reminded the other thing. Get a
power equalization between the sexes women? What do they want?
We want to end gender inequality, and to do this
we need everyone involved. The government's policy is that women
should get the same pay that men get or similar work.
(04:54):
And here are the all male nominees. Welcome back to
the pay Check. I'm Rebecca Greenfield. In this episode, we're
going to explain why that nineteenth century sex scandal still matters.
It established women in the workforce as cheap labor from
day one. A big part of the pay gap has
(05:16):
to do with what's called occupational sorting. This is the
idea that even today, women still do women's work their teachers, nurses, secretaries,
and those jobs pay less. This is what happens when
you have a hundred years of rules and laws that
dictate what women can and can't do, laws based on
the idea that women, because we can have babies, are
(05:40):
fundamentally different from men. Take those treasury secretaries. They just
wanted equal pay for equal work, but that question quickly
turned into a debate about whether women should really just
stay home and what would happen if we didn't. This
idea that women's biology and sexuality dictate what we should
and shouldn't do for work comes up again and again.
(06:03):
I asked my colleague Claire Sebteth to talk with me
about how this idea has played out over time and
what it has to do with the pay gap. Hi Clarik,
Hi Becca. Okay, so take me back to the sixties.
Why was it such a big deal for these women
to be working well? Up until this point, for the
(06:26):
most part, women weren't really working at least not for pay.
I mean, the sixties is the decade where slavery is abolished,
so many black women aren't even free. So when we
talk about women working for pay, we're largely talking about
white women. And maybe if they're single, they might be
a teacher or a governess. But for the most part,
they got married and stayed home and had kids. They
(06:49):
had a lot of kids. I think the average around
that time was about seven per mother. This was also
a time period, by the way, when women were quite
literally thought of as the weaker sex, the weaker sex.
What does that mean. It means essentially that people thought
women were not as intelligent or hard working or able
to do things as well as men. There's this really
(07:10):
famous quote from a brief by Lewis Brandeis and I
know it before he became a Supreme Court justice, and
he talks about this and these are his thoughts, but
they are representative of pretty much everyone's thought. Women are
fundamentally weaker than men in all that makes for endurance,
in muscular strength, in nervous energy, and he powers of
persistent attention and application. He also goes on to talk
(07:33):
later in this brief about how women shouldn't even hold
jobs that require them to stand for long hours because
their feet were delicate and their legs weren't quote good
sustaining columns. Okay, so women are just not fit to work.
They're either pregnant having children, or just like their bodies
aren't made for it. Yeah, or their feet are small.
(07:54):
But what if women need to make money? Obviously, even
at this time, even among the people who who hold
these beliefs, they do know that women do sometimes have
to make money themselves. They could be widowed, their husbands
could be too sick, or you know, God forbid, they
could be single. So they started to pass these laws saying, Okay,
how do we fit these weaker beings into the workforce.
(08:17):
The laws that they passed are called protective laws. And
I don't know about you, but I had never heard
of this when I first started reading about it. So
I found a historian to explain it to me. I'm
Nancy Wallack. I'm research scholar and Arner History Department, and
I specialized in American history and especially in American women's history.
(08:40):
What were they protecting women from? It's always changing in
the progressive ye or of women. Reformers did advocate the
laws on the basis of of of women's work in
the in the home. They valued women's work as home maker, said,
as mothers and wife more than they of roles as workers.
(09:02):
You want to preserve women's health so that they can
have healthy children, which is good for society. That wasn't
essentially the legal the legal documents. There were a ton
of these laws, and they got really specific. Ohio, for instance,
had twenty two laws to keep women out of specific
(09:23):
forms of work, not just minds, but also elevator operators,
crossing guards. Why couldn't women be elevator operators? The idea
was that if a woman worked as an elevator operator
and she ran a man up to his apartment late
at night, something untoward might happen. So some places said
(09:44):
no elevator operators. In New York City actually said okay,
you can be an elevator operator, um, but women just
can't work past ten pm. So that also took care
of women in bars or restaurants or anything like that.
They were essentially protecting women from getting in situations where
something bad might have up into them. But at the
same time they were also kind of protecting men from
these wanton women who would be a late night elevator operators.
(10:08):
We just can't conceive of women outside of their sexuality. Basically,
they're either at home having babies or outside having sex.
They can't just be an elevator operator doing their job. No,
absolutely not. How do these laws play into what women earn?
You have all these women who do need money, they
need to work, but you have this limited list of
(10:28):
jobs that they can hold. So you essentially get this
supply and demand problem. You have way more women wanting
to work than they can. If you're an employer, that's
great for you because you don't have to pay them
that much because there's always going to be some other
woman willing to accept the lower pay. She goes through
the mill of New York eight hundred employment funerals. She
(10:49):
learns that although lots of jobs are listed, there are
ten applicants for each one, girls with city references and
city experience. But are you sure you're han't got something
for me? We don't take any series. Good? What about race?
This is all happening just a few decades after slavery
is abolished, right, Yeah, so black people were limited in
(11:13):
the jobs they can and cannot do by law. It
was even more explicit and more segregated than law is
created for women. And you essentially have the economy divided
up into these, you know, jobs that are appropriate for
white men, jobs that are appropriate for black men, white women,
black women. And this occupational sorting that we have now
you can trace it back to this time period where
(11:34):
even today, black women are twice as likely as white
women to hold service industry jobs, right because back then
they weren't even allowed to hold the better paying jobs.
And that was true for anybody who wasn't white. So
that's kind of where we are. And things only really
start to change because they have to our Gundry and Berrol.
(11:55):
The women of America rallied to the support of the
So I know about World War Two, men enter the
workforce in large numbers, and we have Rosie the Riveter
and women going into factories. Yeah, and it's not that
we have Rosie the Riveter. We have two and a
half million Rosie the Riveters. And here in this almost
the last rate industry we thought could be handled only
(12:16):
by men, these mothers, wives and sweethearts came to stand
shoulder to shoulder with them in almost every capacity. Women
entered the labor force in huge numbers in a way
that they never had before, and they were holding jobs
that had previously, because of these laws, been thought inappropriate
(12:37):
for them. Were they getting paid equally at that time?
It's interesting because if you're a factory owner and all
your workers go off to war and you start hiring
women and paying them less. When your workers come back
from more, are you going to pay them their old
wages that are higher or are you going to stick
with the lower wages you've been paying women. So labor
(12:58):
unions actually started lobbying for equal pay less because they
were concerned about women. Then they were concerned about the
men returning from war getting their old wages. Is this
all women? No, it's not all women. This was largely
just for white women. Technically, President Roosevelt outlawed racial discrimination
in the war industry, but it was pretty inconsistent, and
(13:23):
things really only opened up for black people towards the
end of the war when they're just really weren't enough
white people to fill all the jobs. What happens when
the men come back. Women have shown what they could
do in war, and now that the fighting is over,
women intend to show the world what they can do
in peace. When the men come back, the protective laws
(13:47):
come back. Wait, the protective laws came back. Yeah, they
actually had been in place the whole time. They just
were usually written with this little clause saying, you know,
in case of emergency, we don't have to do this.
And the world ward who was definitely an emergency. So
men come back. The women get pushed out of the workforce. Also,
very quickly you end up going from you know, of
(14:09):
auto industry workers in were women and two years later
it's eight percent. It's like boom, So you get from
Rosie the riveter to leave it to Beaver. Essentially, when
do the protective laws go away? They go away when
two things happen. The first is a smaller step, it
seems really big at the time. The Democratic track Boom
(14:31):
in which you ran, promises to work for if they
right for women and footing equal pay. I must say
I am a strong believer in equal pay, here for
equal work, and I think that we are to work
do better than we're doing in President Kennedy signs the
Equal Pay Act, which means that a woman holding any
(14:54):
job has to be paid the same as a man.
But that just means of a job that she's already holding.
It doesn't mean that you have to allow her to
hold any job whatsoever. That happens because of the Civil
Rights Act. And actually it sort of happens by accident,
which is something that has sort of been lost to history,
but I talked to Nancy about it. The accident was
(15:16):
the addition of sex to Title seven of the nine
Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act was protecting people
against racial discrimination, and Title seven of the Civil Rights
Act as racial discrimination at work. First, at least a decade,
UH southern congressman had been trying to add a provision
(15:39):
about sex too civil Rights Acts in order to UH
topple the Acts. They would say, okay, well, if you
want us to treat everyone, you know, equally according to race,
what if we treat women equally too, And people would say, well,
that's ridiculous, and so then all the bills would just die.
So for this comes up again, a Virginia congressman does
(16:02):
the same thing that had worked in the past, but
this time lawmakers on the other side called this bluff.
They were like, fine, we'll treat women equally. So the
word sex gets added to the Civil Rights Act, the
law passes, and then boom, Women can, in theory anyway,
hold any job that they want to. So we end
a discrimination basically on a dare Yeah, And when you
(16:24):
think about it, essentially that means we passed this law,
this very big law, changing something quite fundamental in our economy,
without really believing all the stuff behind it. So for
the next fifty years we've essentially been fighting about what
that means. The Equal Pay Act and the Civil Rights
(16:50):
Act were really important. Women are no longer barred from
working in the most lucrative fields, and once we get
to those fields, we're supposed to get equal pay for
that work. Those two pieces of legislation did a lot
to bring women's pay more in line with what men
were earning. But it doesn't end there because now businesses
(17:14):
have to comply with the laws, and in a lot
of cases that means they have to change the way
they operate, and they don't like that. They don't want
to be told who they can or can't hire and
how much they have to pay them or not pay them.
They want the flexibility to do whatever they think will
make them the most money. And companies argue, literally, are
(17:34):
you because they get sued and defend themselves in court
that they have business reasons for discriminating. For example, in
the late nineteen sixties, it was pretty common for the
airlines to require flight attendants to be female and single.
When they got married, they got fired. When United Airlines
got sued, the airline defended its practice in court by
(17:55):
saying the irregularity inherent and stewardess as work schedules, was
in compatible with the women's role in married life. Businesses
push and push against the constraints of the Civil Rights Act,
and they haven't stopped, but sometimes women push back. My
name is Lily led Better and a lis in Jacksonville, Alabama.
(18:19):
In two thousand nine, right after Barack Obama took office,
he signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. It was
the first piece of legislation he signed, and it closed
a legal technicality that companies you to work around with
the Civil Rights Act. Claire talked to Lily about what
it was like to win on the facts and lose
on a technicality. Today, Lily is eighty years old, but
(18:47):
in her younger years she worked at a good Year
tire plan in gads In, Alabama for twenty years. She
made tires mainly the first job I had. I had
three tubers, one produced trader or powers. That meant having
the right former, having the right rubber, the rock chemicals.
(19:07):
She liked good year. She had a four oh one K.
She had benefits, She got time and a half when
she worked over time. She'd worked her way up to
manager and was closing out on a retirement which would
come with a pension. Then one day at work, someone's
up to paper into her employee mailbox. To this day,
she has no idea who wrote it. And it had
(19:28):
four names, it had had three man In mind, somebody
has told me what all of our base pay is.
Those names on the paper were all managers, just like Lily,
but she was making up to forty less than them.
Lily thought about those numbers, social Security, her pension. They
(19:50):
were all tied to her salary. I got home, I
told my husband, I said I have to go to Birmingham,
Alabama and follow a charge with an equal employma combition
because this is not right. And he said, well, what
time you want to leave. Lily found a lawyer and
in two thousand three they went to trial. She had
a strong case and she won They had a four
(20:13):
by eight wild board drawed off with all of the
male's names and my name in the tower room where
I worked, in our starting pay and our ending pay,
all the three the years. And I mean, you could
just sit there and study those numbers, and you knew,
you knew even the lowest rated man. There was one
(20:36):
guy rated a little lower than me, but man, his
salary was twice mine. The jury awarded Lily three point
eight million dollars. The judge reduced it to three hundred
sixty thousand, but it was obvious to everyone that Lily
hadn't been paid as much as the men who held
the same job for accompanying the size of goodyear. Three
sixty thousand wasn't a lot of money, but they didn't
(20:58):
want to pay, and they didn't think they should have to,
the way the Civil Rights Act worked, an employee had
a hundred eighty days to file a lawsuit if they'd
been discriminated against. Lily's team argued that the hundred eighty
days started when she learned she was being paid unfairly,
when she got that slip of paper. The company argued, no,
(21:19):
the act of discrimination began with her first unequal paycheck,
and those a hundred and eighty days had long since expired.
Goodyear appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. Other
businesses wanted them to win, and a supporting brief the
US Chamber of Commerce said it wasn't fair to businesses
if that one eighty day period could last until someone
(21:40):
like Lily found out. They called it an unwarranted and
excessive burden unemployers. The judges ruled five to four in
favor of Goodyear. Lily lost. In a rare move. Justice
Ruth Wader Ginsburg read her dissenting opinion allowed in court
in our of you does not comprehend or is indifferent
(22:03):
to the insidious way in which women can be victims
of pay discrimination. This was not the intent of the
Civil Rights Actinsburg pointed out, But the fact remained that
Lily had lost. She never got a dime. Two years later,
Congress passed the Lily led Better Fair Pay Act. That
(22:24):
day period during which people can sue now it resets
with every unequal paycheck. Since then, countless women have filed
suit under the law. A lot of people have found
on that a lot of people have gotten money, and
I'll lock it Ultimately, equal pay isn't just an economic
(22:45):
issue for millions of Americans and their families. It's a
question of who we are and whether we're truly living
up to our fundamental ideals. That is what Lily led
Better challenged us to do, and today I signed this
bill not just in her honor, but in the honor
of those who came before. All these laws try to
(23:06):
fix the same problem. Men and women have never been
valued the same way in the labor market, Not since
Francis Spinner hired those secretaries because he could pay them less.
Women's work has always been worthless. We also haven't really
gotten over that sex scandal. The idea that women are
sirens in a mixed workplace is always in danger of
(23:28):
becoming a whorehouse. That sounds ridiculous today, or does it?
The Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence, he
won't eat lunch alone with a woman that isn't his wife.
He says, it's part of a religious practice that asks
men to avoid even the possible appearance of impropriety. This
(23:50):
attitude is surprisingly common. Female staffers in Congress say plenty
of male representatives have similar policies or practices on college campus,
as some male professors avoid closed door meetings with female students.
Practices like these have real consequences for women's careers and
their earning power. They also suggest that women just by
(24:11):
being women create problems for everyone. Next week on The Paycheck,
we're going to hear from people who don't believe in
the pay gap at all, and if there is a
pay gap, they know who's to blame. Um. Women don't
negotiate as much as men do, and that could explain it.
I think we're a little bit more reserved when it
(24:33):
comes to fighting for what we want. I think we're
a little bit more scared. I think overall, women are
willing to accept less than men. Thanks for listening to
The Paycheck. If you like the show, please head on
over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to rate, review,
and subscribe. This episode of The Paycheck was reported by
(24:53):
Claire Setteth and hosted by me Rebecca Greenfield. It was
edited by Janet Paskin and deduced by Magnus Henrickson. We
also had production help from Liz Smuth, Gillian Goodman, Francesca Levi,
and me. Our original music is by Leo Sidron, Carrie
vander Riott to the illustrations on our show page, which
(25:14):
you can find at bloomberg dot com slash paycheck. Francesca
Levy is Bloomberg's head of podcasts
The first equal paid debate in the US started way
back in the eighteen sixties, and it ended in the
most American of ways, with a sex scandal. It was
a huge It was a huge scandal. That's Jessica Zappero.
She wrote This Grand Experiment, a book about when women
first went to work in the federal government in eighteen
(00:28):
sixty one, at the start of the Civil War. The
government is running out of money to pay federal workers.
It needs cheap labor. The Treasure of the US at
the time is Francis Spinner, and he has this great
idea higher women. When he went and inspected the treasury,
he found men performing tasks that he thought were better
suited to and more cheaply performed by women. Spinner is
(00:52):
trying to keep costs down, so he goes out and
offers women six hundred dollars a year for these jobs,
half of what the met are making. It's the first
time the government hires women, and it's a big opportunity.
He gets tons of applicants. At first, women are happy
to have the jobs, but even then d C was
(01:14):
an expensive place to live, and they soon start agitating
for more money. They petitioned Congress. They write letters to
newspapers like this one, which ran in the New York
Times in early eighteen sixty nine. Very few persons denied
a justice of the principle that equal work should command
equal pay without regard to the sex of the labor.
(01:36):
But it is one thing to acknowledge the right of
a principle, and quite another to practice it. Women are
known to be as good printers, teachers, telegraph clerks, etcetera.
As men, but fewer occupations are open to them. Their
necessity for employment is greater. Therefore their services can be
obtained for less. They say, we're doing the same job.
(01:56):
It's galling to watch men continue to get raises when
they're already earning so much and we're doing the exact
same job. Why are we different? What makes us to
differ from them? It's a reasonable question, and Congress doesn't
dismiss them. By eight seventy a handful of bills have
been introduced that would give women equal pay for equal work.
(02:17):
The US government had officially taken up the equal pay debate.
This is where that sex scandal comes in. It's the
first time men and women are working together, and while
there's some romance. A few relationships become public and it's
a huge deal. Newspapers cover it, politicians talk about it.
(02:41):
It's so notable that guide books to DC make sure
visitors know about it. It's impossible to tell how many
of these female clerks are pure women or how many impure.
The black sheep are greatly in the minority, but are
still believed to be numerous. It's delicious gossip, and it
(03:03):
creates this idea that women working at the Treasury get
paid not to do clerical work, but to be sexually
available to men. Essentially, as far as some people are concerned,
this is government sanctioned prostitution. As Congress is debating equal pay,
one faction brings those up. You have been saying, we
shouldn't be employing women at all. They're all prostitutes. Why
(03:26):
are we even talking about this. We should just fire
all of them. None of the equal pay bills pass,
and it's partly because of this thinking. This is really significant.
It sets the standard for the next hundred fifty years.
This is how women enter the professional workforce from their
private companies also start to hire women to do clerical work,
(03:47):
and taking a queue from the government, they pay them less,
and perhaps had the federal government equally rewarded male and
female labor at this point, maybe private labor would have
paid them better as well. But instead Congress sent this
clear mess age that it was acceptable to treat women
as exploitable and marginal employees and to women themselves that
they were fundamentally inferior to men. When you look at
(04:13):
the world, you know what the population like. Where is
our place like? Where is our value? Wodn deserve people
for equal work? The gender lie helps to keep women
not on a pedestal but in a cage. First, have
you've done for the women according to the promises of
the platform. I'm sure we haven't done enough. And then
(04:33):
I'm glad that you reminded the other thing. Get a
power equalization between the sexes women? What do they want?
We want to end gender inequality, and to do this
we need everyone involved. The government's policy is that women
should get the same pay that men get or similar work.
(04:54):
And here are the all male nominees. Welcome back to
the pay Check. I'm Rebecca Greenfield. In this episode, we're
going to explain why that nineteenth century sex scandal still matters.
It established women in the workforce as cheap labor from
day one. A big part of the pay gap has
(05:16):
to do with what's called occupational sorting. This is the
idea that even today, women still do women's work their teachers, nurses, secretaries,
and those jobs pay less. This is what happens when
you have a hundred years of rules and laws that
dictate what women can and can't do, laws based on
the idea that women, because we can have babies, are
(05:40):
fundamentally different from men. Take those treasury secretaries. They just
wanted equal pay for equal work, but that question quickly
turned into a debate about whether women should really just
stay home and what would happen if we didn't. This
idea that women's biology and sexuality dictate what we should
and shouldn't do for work comes up again and again.
(06:03):
I asked my colleague Claire Sebteth to talk with me
about how this idea has played out over time and
what it has to do with the pay gap. Hi Clarik,
Hi Becca. Okay, so take me back to the sixties.
Why was it such a big deal for these women
to be working well? Up until this point, for the
(06:26):
most part, women weren't really working at least not for pay.
I mean, the sixties is the decade where slavery is abolished,
so many black women aren't even free. So when we
talk about women working for pay, we're largely talking about
white women. And maybe if they're single, they might be
a teacher or a governess. But for the most part,
they got married and stayed home and had kids. They
(06:49):
had a lot of kids. I think the average around
that time was about seven per mother. This was also
a time period, by the way, when women were quite
literally thought of as the weaker sex, the weaker sex.
What does that mean. It means essentially that people thought
women were not as intelligent or hard working or able
to do things as well as men. There's this really
(07:10):
famous quote from a brief by Lewis Brandeis and I
know it before he became a Supreme Court justice, and
he talks about this and these are his thoughts, but
they are representative of pretty much everyone's thought. Women are
fundamentally weaker than men in all that makes for endurance,
in muscular strength, in nervous energy, and he powers of
persistent attention and application. He also goes on to talk
(07:33):
later in this brief about how women shouldn't even hold
jobs that require them to stand for long hours because
their feet were delicate and their legs weren't quote good
sustaining columns. Okay, so women are just not fit to work.
They're either pregnant having children, or just like their bodies
aren't made for it. Yeah, or their feet are small.
(07:54):
But what if women need to make money? Obviously, even
at this time, even among the people who who hold
these beliefs, they do know that women do sometimes have
to make money themselves. They could be widowed, their husbands
could be too sick, or you know, God forbid, they
could be single. So they started to pass these laws saying, Okay,
how do we fit these weaker beings into the workforce.
(08:17):
The laws that they passed are called protective laws. And
I don't know about you, but I had never heard
of this when I first started reading about it. So
I found a historian to explain it to me. I'm
Nancy Wallack. I'm research scholar and Arner History Department, and
I specialized in American history and especially in American women's history.
(08:40):
What were they protecting women from? It's always changing in
the progressive ye or of women. Reformers did advocate the
laws on the basis of of of women's work in
the in the home. They valued women's work as home maker, said,
as mothers and wife more than they of roles as workers.
(09:02):
You want to preserve women's health so that they can
have healthy children, which is good for society. That wasn't
essentially the legal the legal documents. There were a ton
of these laws, and they got really specific. Ohio, for instance,
had twenty two laws to keep women out of specific
(09:23):
forms of work, not just minds, but also elevator operators,
crossing guards. Why couldn't women be elevator operators? The idea
was that if a woman worked as an elevator operator
and she ran a man up to his apartment late
at night, something untoward might happen. So some places said
(09:44):
no elevator operators. In New York City actually said okay,
you can be an elevator operator, um, but women just
can't work past ten pm. So that also took care
of women in bars or restaurants or anything like that.
They were essentially protecting women from getting in situations where
something bad might have up into them. But at the
same time they were also kind of protecting men from
these wanton women who would be a late night elevator operators.
(10:08):
We just can't conceive of women outside of their sexuality. Basically,
they're either at home having babies or outside having sex.
They can't just be an elevator operator doing their job. No,
absolutely not. How do these laws play into what women earn?
You have all these women who do need money, they
need to work, but you have this limited list of
(10:28):
jobs that they can hold. So you essentially get this
supply and demand problem. You have way more women wanting
to work than they can. If you're an employer, that's
great for you because you don't have to pay them
that much because there's always going to be some other
woman willing to accept the lower pay. She goes through
the mill of New York eight hundred employment funerals. She
(10:49):
learns that although lots of jobs are listed, there are
ten applicants for each one, girls with city references and
city experience. But are you sure you're han't got something
for me? We don't take any series. Good? What about race?
This is all happening just a few decades after slavery
is abolished, right, Yeah, so black people were limited in
(11:13):
the jobs they can and cannot do by law. It
was even more explicit and more segregated than law is
created for women. And you essentially have the economy divided
up into these, you know, jobs that are appropriate for
white men, jobs that are appropriate for black men, white women,
black women. And this occupational sorting that we have now
you can trace it back to this time period where
(11:34):
even today, black women are twice as likely as white
women to hold service industry jobs, right because back then
they weren't even allowed to hold the better paying jobs.
And that was true for anybody who wasn't white. So
that's kind of where we are. And things only really
start to change because they have to our Gundry and Berrol.
(11:55):
The women of America rallied to the support of the
So I know about World War Two, men enter the
workforce in large numbers, and we have Rosie the Riveter
and women going into factories. Yeah, and it's not that
we have Rosie the Riveter. We have two and a
half million Rosie the Riveters. And here in this almost
the last rate industry we thought could be handled only
(12:16):
by men, these mothers, wives and sweethearts came to stand
shoulder to shoulder with them in almost every capacity. Women
entered the labor force in huge numbers in a way
that they never had before, and they were holding jobs
that had previously, because of these laws, been thought inappropriate
(12:37):
for them. Were they getting paid equally at that time?
It's interesting because if you're a factory owner and all
your workers go off to war and you start hiring
women and paying them less. When your workers come back
from more, are you going to pay them their old
wages that are higher or are you going to stick
with the lower wages you've been paying women. So labor
(12:58):
unions actually started lobbying for equal pay less because they
were concerned about women. Then they were concerned about the
men returning from war getting their old wages. Is this
all women? No, it's not all women. This was largely
just for white women. Technically, President Roosevelt outlawed racial discrimination
in the war industry, but it was pretty inconsistent, and
(13:23):
things really only opened up for black people towards the
end of the war when they're just really weren't enough
white people to fill all the jobs. What happens when
the men come back. Women have shown what they could
do in war, and now that the fighting is over,
women intend to show the world what they can do
in peace. When the men come back, the protective laws
(13:47):
come back. Wait, the protective laws came back. Yeah, they
actually had been in place the whole time. They just
were usually written with this little clause saying, you know,
in case of emergency, we don't have to do this.
And the world ward who was definitely an emergency. So
men come back. The women get pushed out of the workforce. Also,
very quickly you end up going from you know, of
(14:09):
auto industry workers in were women and two years later
it's eight percent. It's like boom, So you get from
Rosie the riveter to leave it to Beaver. Essentially, when
do the protective laws go away? They go away when
two things happen. The first is a smaller step, it
seems really big at the time. The Democratic track Boom
(14:31):
in which you ran, promises to work for if they
right for women and footing equal pay. I must say
I am a strong believer in equal pay, here for
equal work, and I think that we are to work
do better than we're doing in President Kennedy signs the
Equal Pay Act, which means that a woman holding any
(14:54):
job has to be paid the same as a man.
But that just means of a job that she's already holding.
It doesn't mean that you have to allow her to
hold any job whatsoever. That happens because of the Civil
Rights Act. And actually it sort of happens by accident,
which is something that has sort of been lost to history,
but I talked to Nancy about it. The accident was
(15:16):
the addition of sex to Title seven of the nine
Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act was protecting people
against racial discrimination, and Title seven of the Civil Rights
Act as racial discrimination at work. First, at least a decade,
UH southern congressman had been trying to add a provision
(15:39):
about sex too civil Rights Acts in order to UH
topple the Acts. They would say, okay, well, if you
want us to treat everyone, you know, equally according to race,
what if we treat women equally too, And people would say, well,
that's ridiculous, and so then all the bills would just die.
So for this comes up again, a Virginia congressman does
(16:02):
the same thing that had worked in the past, but
this time lawmakers on the other side called this bluff.
They were like, fine, we'll treat women equally. So the
word sex gets added to the Civil Rights Act, the
law passes, and then boom, Women can, in theory anyway,
hold any job that they want to. So we end
a discrimination basically on a dare Yeah, And when you
(16:24):
think about it, essentially that means we passed this law,
this very big law, changing something quite fundamental in our economy,
without really believing all the stuff behind it. So for
the next fifty years we've essentially been fighting about what
that means. The Equal Pay Act and the Civil Rights
(16:50):
Act were really important. Women are no longer barred from
working in the most lucrative fields, and once we get
to those fields, we're supposed to get equal pay for
that work. Those two pieces of legislation did a lot
to bring women's pay more in line with what men
were earning. But it doesn't end there because now businesses
(17:14):
have to comply with the laws, and in a lot
of cases that means they have to change the way
they operate, and they don't like that. They don't want
to be told who they can or can't hire and
how much they have to pay them or not pay them.
They want the flexibility to do whatever they think will
make them the most money. And companies argue, literally, are
(17:34):
you because they get sued and defend themselves in court
that they have business reasons for discriminating. For example, in
the late nineteen sixties, it was pretty common for the
airlines to require flight attendants to be female and single.
When they got married, they got fired. When United Airlines
got sued, the airline defended its practice in court by
(17:55):
saying the irregularity inherent and stewardess as work schedules, was
in compatible with the women's role in married life. Businesses
push and push against the constraints of the Civil Rights Act,
and they haven't stopped, but sometimes women push back. My
name is Lily led Better and a lis in Jacksonville, Alabama.
(18:19):
In two thousand nine, right after Barack Obama took office,
he signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. It was
the first piece of legislation he signed, and it closed
a legal technicality that companies you to work around with
the Civil Rights Act. Claire talked to Lily about what
it was like to win on the facts and lose
on a technicality. Today, Lily is eighty years old, but
(18:47):
in her younger years she worked at a good Year
tire plan in gads In, Alabama for twenty years. She
made tires mainly the first job I had. I had
three tubers, one produced trader or powers. That meant having
the right former, having the right rubber, the rock chemicals.
(19:07):
She liked good year. She had a four oh one K.
She had benefits, She got time and a half when
she worked over time. She'd worked her way up to
manager and was closing out on a retirement which would
come with a pension. Then one day at work, someone's
up to paper into her employee mailbox. To this day,
she has no idea who wrote it. And it had
(19:28):
four names, it had had three man In mind, somebody
has told me what all of our base pay is.
Those names on the paper were all managers, just like Lily,
but she was making up to forty less than them.
Lily thought about those numbers, social Security, her pension. They
(19:50):
were all tied to her salary. I got home, I
told my husband, I said I have to go to Birmingham,
Alabama and follow a charge with an equal employma combition
because this is not right. And he said, well, what
time you want to leave. Lily found a lawyer and
in two thousand three they went to trial. She had
a strong case and she won They had a four
(20:13):
by eight wild board drawed off with all of the
male's names and my name in the tower room where
I worked, in our starting pay and our ending pay,
all the three the years. And I mean, you could
just sit there and study those numbers, and you knew,
you knew even the lowest rated man. There was one
(20:36):
guy rated a little lower than me, but man, his
salary was twice mine. The jury awarded Lily three point
eight million dollars. The judge reduced it to three hundred
sixty thousand, but it was obvious to everyone that Lily
hadn't been paid as much as the men who held
the same job for accompanying the size of goodyear. Three
sixty thousand wasn't a lot of money, but they didn't
(20:58):
want to pay, and they didn't think they should have to,
the way the Civil Rights Act worked, an employee had
a hundred eighty days to file a lawsuit if they'd
been discriminated against. Lily's team argued that the hundred eighty
days started when she learned she was being paid unfairly,
when she got that slip of paper. The company argued, no,
(21:19):
the act of discrimination began with her first unequal paycheck,
and those a hundred and eighty days had long since expired.
Goodyear appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. Other
businesses wanted them to win, and a supporting brief the
US Chamber of Commerce said it wasn't fair to businesses
if that one eighty day period could last until someone
(21:40):
like Lily found out. They called it an unwarranted and
excessive burden unemployers. The judges ruled five to four in
favor of Goodyear. Lily lost. In a rare move. Justice
Ruth Wader Ginsburg read her dissenting opinion allowed in court
in our of you does not comprehend or is indifferent
(22:03):
to the insidious way in which women can be victims
of pay discrimination. This was not the intent of the
Civil Rights Actinsburg pointed out, But the fact remained that
Lily had lost. She never got a dime. Two years later,
Congress passed the Lily led Better Fair Pay Act. That
(22:24):
day period during which people can sue now it resets
with every unequal paycheck. Since then, countless women have filed
suit under the law. A lot of people have found
on that a lot of people have gotten money, and
I'll lock it Ultimately, equal pay isn't just an economic
(22:45):
issue for millions of Americans and their families. It's a
question of who we are and whether we're truly living
up to our fundamental ideals. That is what Lily led
Better challenged us to do, and today I signed this
bill not just in her honor, but in the honor
of those who came before. All these laws try to
(23:06):
fix the same problem. Men and women have never been
valued the same way in the labor market, Not since
Francis Spinner hired those secretaries because he could pay them less.
Women's work has always been worthless. We also haven't really
gotten over that sex scandal. The idea that women are
sirens in a mixed workplace is always in danger of
(23:28):
becoming a whorehouse. That sounds ridiculous today, or does it?
The Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence, he
won't eat lunch alone with a woman that isn't his wife.
He says, it's part of a religious practice that asks
men to avoid even the possible appearance of impropriety. This
(23:50):
attitude is surprisingly common. Female staffers in Congress say plenty
of male representatives have similar policies or practices on college campus,
as some male professors avoid closed door meetings with female students.
Practices like these have real consequences for women's careers and
their earning power. They also suggest that women just by
(24:11):
being women create problems for everyone. Next week on The Paycheck,
we're going to hear from people who don't believe in
the pay gap at all, and if there is a
pay gap, they know who's to blame. Um. Women don't
negotiate as much as men do, and that could explain it.
I think we're a little bit more reserved when it
(24:33):
comes to fighting for what we want. I think we're
a little bit more scared. I think overall, women are
willing to accept less than men. Thanks for listening to
The Paycheck. If you like the show, please head on
over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to rate, review,
and subscribe. This episode of The Paycheck was reported by
(24:53):
Claire Setteth and hosted by me Rebecca Greenfield. It was
edited by Janet Paskin and deduced by Magnus Henrickson. We
also had production help from Liz Smuth, Gillian Goodman, Francesca Levi,
and me. Our original music is by Leo Sidron, Carrie
vander Riott to the illustrations on our show page, which
(25:14):
you can find at bloomberg dot com slash paycheck. Francesca
Levy is Bloomberg's head of podcasts
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