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