Equal pay

This is Equal Pay Day, the annual reminder that, despite 36 years of legislation to the contrary, American women still get substantially less money than American men for doing substantially the same work.

True, the wage gap has narrowed since President Kennedy signed the 1963 Equal Pay Act — women earned 59 cents to the male dollar then; it’s up to 74 cents now. In other words, take a typical woman’s full-time earnings for the year to date — April 8 — and add it to her total 1998 earnings. She’s made what the typical man made in 1998 alone.

Progress in ending this most basic inequity has been excruciatingly slow — 15 cents in 36 years isn’t even a half-cent per year, it hardly demonstrates an honest effort. Even worse, research suggests that much of the improvement in recent years has been due to the decline in the real wages of men, not due to raises for women.

The argument that women don’t bring as much value to the workplace just doesn’t work anymore — they have the education, the training, the experience. The argument that a woman’s paycheck merely supplements the primary breadwinner’s is antiquated — 64 percent of women contribute at least half of family income and 41 percent are heads of households. The argument that women take too much time away from the job for family matters is Neanderthal.

Prehistoric employers use several techniques to perpetuate the wage gap. One is different job classifications for work that requires the same education, skills and responsibilities. Stock and inventory clerks, mostly men, make $470 on average. Office clerks, mostly women, only $361.

Making it a firing offense to discuss wages with co-workers is another technique. This is how the wage gap is maintained for highly educated professionals — physicians, lawyers, college professors — as well as for typists and cooks.

The wage gap averages about $4,800 per female worker across the country. That adds up during a working life, it bites again at pension time. Lower wages for women means lower wages for men, too. After all, why pay more for the same work?

Maine does a little better than the national average; women here earn 76 cents per dollar. That still adds up to $1.1 billion in getting shortchanged per year. And being two cents better than average isn’t saying much, since the average is driven down by the shocking level of discrimination that persists in a handful of southern and western states, where 60 cents per dollar can still be found.

Some states are acting aggressively to close this gap. In Illinois, which already has a narrower gap than Maine, the legislature is considering a bill that would allow for greater compensatory and punitive damages against guilty employers, would ease the way for class action suits and would prohibit gag rules regarding wage discussions among coworkers. Congress has similar legislation before it. Maine should do the same. Thirty-six years is long enough.