Working Women
Labor Center Reports
Working Women Overview
Working Women Resources
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In 1963, with the passage of the landmark Equal Pay Act, Congress
officially outlawed the common practice of paying women less than
men for equal work within the same occupation. The following year,
Congress prohibited all forms of gender and racial discrimination
in work compensation with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Four decades later, though there has been some progress, our society
is still marked by striking pay inequality between men and women.
Due to the concentration of women in low paying jobs as well as
ongoing illegal discrimination, women still earn, on average, 24%
less than men. Recent studies show that women are half as likely
to receive pension plans. When they do get pensions, they are nearly
half as large as those of men. In practice, this pay gap translates
into significantly higher poverty rates and diminished livelihoods
for women and their families.
Advocates point to a number of changes that could narrow that gap,
among them raising the minimum wage, enacting more effective legislation,
and unionization. Unionization is a particularly powerful means
of improving pay equity. In California, 1999, women union members
earned about $4.70 cents an hour more than their non-union counterparts,
amounting to a union premium of about 25.1%, compared to 17.7% for
men. Studies have shown that when women have the option of joining
unions, they tend to vote for unionization in greater numbers than
men.
But the labor movement has far to go to fully embrace working women.
Despite some recent progress, women are still grossly underrepresented
in union leadership positions. Of the AFL-CIO's 57 current Executive
Council members, for example, only 6 are women.
Photo by David Bacon
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Facts:
In 2001, the average woman was paid 76 cents for every dollar her male counterpart
was paid.
U.S. Census Bureau
African-American women are paid only 65 cents for every dollar received by
white men while Hispanic women are paid only 53 cents to the dollar.
Bureau of Labor Statistics
Women made up 18.3 percent of the labor force in 1900, 29.6 percent in 1950
and 46.6 percent in 2001.
U.S. Bureau of the Census, The Statistical History of the United States-from
Colonial Times to the Present, 1976. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Handbook of
Labor Statistics-Bulletin 2340, August 1989. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment and Earnings, January 2002.
70 percent of part-time workers are female.
Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and John Schmitt, The State of Working
America 1996-97, Economic Policy Institute, 1996. |
