Over their lifetimes, working women of all educational backgrounds lose more than $434,000 due to the ongoing gender gap in wages, a new report published last week by the Center for American Progress Action Fund revealed.
The study, "Lifetime Losses: The Career Wage Gap," defined the "gender wage gap" as the difference between the median wages of all full-time working men and women. The gender gap adversely impacts women of all educational levels and in all comparable jobs with men. It causes the greatest financial losses, however, for older women with the most experience in the workforce.
According to the report, women with higher levels of education tend to lose more income over the course of their careers. Women with a college degree or higher lose more than $713,000 over the working life, according to the study, while women without high school diplomas lose about $270,000.
Racism may also play role, the study implied. African American and Latina women fare the worst, in terms of the gender pay gap, among all women workers.
Though the report failed to note the relationship of gender-based pay inequity to corporate profits, it is clear that the hundreds of thousands of dollars a woman will lose over the course of her career adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars in extra profits reaped by corporations. In one basic sense, their is a profit motive behind gender-based discrimination.
The issue of the gender wage gap received new attention this past year when Democrats in Congress attempted to pass the Fair Pay Act. This law would have remedied a recent Supreme Court court decision that dramatically limited the ability of women to seek redress over instances of pay discrimination.
In 2007, the high court threw out Lilly Ledbetter's law suit against Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company for pay discrimination based on gender. A jury in the initial trial believed that Ledbetter proved her case and awarded her more than $220,000 in back pay over the 19 years of her career at Goodyear, plus other damages.
The court ruled that Ledbetter could not legally sue Goodyear because the law required that she file her suit within six months of receiving her first discriminatory paycheck. Ledbetter argued that she did not find out about the unequal pay until many years later when an anonymous worker put a note in her locker. Therefore, she could not have filed a suit under the conditions determined by the Supreme Court.
Advocates of fair pay argued that the court decision and the law essentially allows employers who practice discrimination to go unpunished, and thus have no incentive to carefully implement their own fair pay practices.
In 2008, Democrats in the House of Representative passed the Fair Pay Act which would have revised federal law allowing workers who faced pay discrimination (based on gender, race, nationality, etc.) to sue their employers who violated the law within six months of receiving their last discriminatory paycheck.
Senate Republicans filibustered the bill, erroneously claiming, as Republican presidential John McCain did, that the gender gap in pay resulted not from discrimination but in differences in education and experience. The new law, they insisted, would simply lead to frivolous lawsuits.
The Republican claim ignored the widely recognized fact that women as a whole are the most educated segment of US society.
The new report from the Center for American Progress Action Fund substantiated the claims offered by those who countered the Senate Republicans saying that the gender gap most significantly impacts the most educated and most experienced segments of the workforce.
Correction: An earlier version of this article described the publisher of the report named above as the Center for American Progress. The correct publisher is the Center for American Progress Action Fund. This version reflects the correction.
--Reach Joel Wendland at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.
