Womenstake

Pay Equity Bill Advancing in the Senate

by Jocelyn Samuels, Vice President for Education and Employment
National Women’s Law Center

We’ve just gotten word that the Fair Pay Restoration Act — a key bill that would make it easier to ensure justice for women who have suffered from pay discrimination — is moving forward in the Senate. A vote could occur soon.

Stay tuned — we’ll let you know when we hear more...

(The background: The Fair Pay Restoration Act would correct the recent Supreme Court ruling, Ledbetter v. Goodyear, which made it virtually impossible for women who face pay discrimination to take action against their employers. The bill would give all employees a better shot at a fair workplace, making it easier to ensure justice for those who have been discriminated against based on sex, race, ethnicity, religion, disability, and age. Get more details on the bill.)

Education That Leaves Too Many Children Behind

by Fatima Goss Graves, Senior Counsel
and Jocelyn Samuels, Vice President for Education and Employment
National Women’s Law Center

The walls of the boys’ classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit a cool white light and the thermostat is set to 69 degrees. In the girls’ room, by contrast, the walls are yellow, the light bulbs emit a warm yellow light and the temperature is kept six degrees warmer ...

Boys don’t hear as well as girls, which means that an instructor needs to speak louder in order for the boys in the room to hear her; and ... boys’ visual systems are better at seeing action, while girls are better at seeing the nuance of color and texture.

You may think that we’re quoting from some educational primer left over from the 1950s. If only that were the case. Instead, these descriptions come from this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, which had a lengthy piece on single sex schools. The article lavished considerable attention on the theories of Leonard Sax, who founded something called the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education — an organization that encourages schools to solve their educational problems by devising sex-segregated programs, classrooms, and schools based on unproven stereotypes about boys and girls.

Sax spends much of his time emphasizing selected developmental and brain research about boys and girls. But most experts agree that the evidence shows nothing about the likely educational achievement of boys and girls, much less justifies Sax’s boosterism about single sex programs. For example, there may be differences in male and female brain size, but that does not mean that boys and girls need different learning environments. What’s more, even where there are differences between boys and girls on average, there are too many students who — as individuals — will deviate from Sax’s supposed “norm.” Sax would have schools exclude from all-boy classrooms even those girls who could do better with cooler room temperatures, and from all-girl programs boys who prefer a cooperative, “warmer,” learning style.

Who’s Keeping Who In Their Place?

By Jocelyn Samuels, Vice President for Educational and Employment Opportunities
National Women's Law Center

As you may have read, Justice Clarence Thomas has written his memoirs – an angry, bitter book that, as the press coverage described, ridicules the sexual harassment allegations raised against him by Anita Hill and claims that she was, according to The Washington Post, “the tool of liberal activist groups “obsessed” with abortion and outraged because he did not fit their idea of what an African American should believe.”  Putting aside for the moment who is obsessed with whom (or what), Justice Thomas’s statements are simply wrong and offensive – in numerous respects.  In an op-ed published on Tuesday in The New York Times, Professor Hill demolished Justice Thomas’s denials of the egregious harassment she endured, as well as responded to his outrageous and vindictive attacks on her character and competence – all in the measured, dignified way that distinguished her testimony 16 years ago this month.  Yesterday’s Post also offers an op ed that amasses some of the evidence that has emerged over time to confirm Professor Hill’s original testimony.

I am proud to be with the Center, which was one of the broad range of organizations that opposed the Thomas nomination and is presumably one of the “liberal activist” groups that the Justice so excoriates.  The Center opposed Judge Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court, well prior to Professor Hill’s testimony, based on his lack of qualifications and the extremist positions demonstrated by his substantive record, including on civil rights, reproductive rights and affirmative action.  Indeed, while most recent Supreme Court nominees have been deemed "well-qualified" by the ABA, the rating for Judge Thomas was split between "qualified" and "not qualified."  When Professor Hill made her allegations – and was first ignored and then abused by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee – it only heightened the concerns we had previously expressed about Judge Thomas’s fitness to serve on the highest court in the land.   

The Minimum We Can Do

by Jocelyn Samuels

Today is the day that the first increase to the minimum wage in more than 10 years goes into effect.  Under federal law, minimum wage workers will now be paid $5.85 per hour, up from $5.15.  That rate will increase to $7.25 per hour by the summer of 2009.

This is a hard-earned victory that will benefit all low-wage workers, particularly women.  Women are two-thirds of minimum-wage workers, and overall women are twice as likely as men to work for the minimum wage.  And the consequences of the stagnant minimum wage have been dire; for example, a woman who supports herself and two children on the minimum wage currently lives at 20% below the poverty level.  It's women like Jessica (below) who struggle to raise a family on the minimum wage, who have finally been given the raise they deserve.

Part 2

Time to Change the Record

by Jocelyn Samuels

You may recall that five years ago, right around the last round-number anniversary of Title IX, the Bush Administration launched an all-out attack on Title IX’s athletics policies, convening a commission that was stacked with opponents of Title IX and that was urged to recommend ways to dilute schools’ obligations to provide equal athletics opportunities for their female students.  This Administration effort was defeated by the groundswell of opposition that your voices produced, demanding that Title IX be kept strong.

You may also remember that, having learned its lesson about trying to make unpopular policy changes in public, the Administration next tried an under-the-radar approach instead.  Without public announcement, and late on a Friday afternoon in March 2005, the Department of Education issued a policy “Clarification” that opened a huge loophole in Title IX compliance standards for schools trying to avoid providing additional sports opportunities for women on their campuses.  Once again, your activism has helped to blunt the impact of that Clarification, producing, among other things, an NCAA recommendation to its member schools that they not use the Clarification to measure whether they are providing equal opportunities for men and women.

But now the Administration is at it again.

"Happy" Equal Pay Day

by Jocelyn Samuels

Although it has been illegal for more than 40 years to pay women less than men for the same work, women still earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn and the gap is even greater for women of color.   Today, Equal Pay Day, marks that sad reality: it is the day when women’s combined earnings from 2006 and the beginning of 2007 finally equal what men earned in 2006.

The consequences of these inequities are profound and far-reaching.  Over their lifetimes, for example, female high school graduates will earn $700,000 less than male graduates.  And one study has found that paying people equally for equal work would reduce the poverty rates of single mothers by half.

But despite what you may have heard people say, women are not choosing to earn less money than their male peers.

NWLC is Fulcrum for Harvard Title IX Conference

by Jocelyn Samuels

It was clear that all roads end (or begin) with NWLC, as our current and former employees, clients and colleagues gathered on Friday for a Title IX seminar hosted by the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender.  The seminar, which highlighted Title IX’s upcoming 35th anniversary, addressed how students, university personnel, advocates and members of the public can act to reduce sexual harassment, sexual assault and discrimination against women in athletics.

I gave a presentation on threats to enforcement of Title IX in the area of athletics, focusing on the dangers posed by the Department of Education’s 2005 clarification and the new lawsuit filed by a coalition of wrestlers to challenge longstanding policies mandating that men and women have equal opportunities to participate in sports.