So you know you’re facing unfair sex discrimination on the job. Maybe you found out your employer is systematically paying women less than men for the same work. Or you got fired as soon as you said you were pregnant. Or your male coworkers have been groping and propositioning you and the other women relentlessly, and the company won’t make them stop. Should you sue?

We cannot answer that question for you. We are not lawyers, and cannot give legal advice. If you want, talk to an attorney who has worked on sex discrimination cases in the past. But before you bring formal charges, here are some things to consider.

Lawsuits—even class action lawsuits—can be brutal. By bringing charges, you will alienate yourself from your colleagues, disrupt your career, taint your reputation, strain your relationships, and put your life on hold for two years or more. You and the other women will be treated as whiners and malcontents, your motives and integrity questioned, your lives dragged unpleasantly into the spotlight. At least some of your colleagues will retaliate. The experience of litigation damages many women’s mental health, reputations, and families. And there is no guarantee of justice at the end.

Nor will there be much money, even if you win an award or settlement that seems extremely large to others. Consider the $34 million settlement that Mitsubishi agreed to pay in 1998 to compensate for brutally hostile sexual harassment at its Normal, Illinois car manufacturing plant. After the lawyers and the taxes were paid, the individual women took home between $5,000 and $50,000 apiece.

Nor is it clear that the lawsuit will actually change your workplace. In the past, some employers have been paying their settlements as a kind of ongoing toll on misbehavior, a cost of doing business, and then continuing in their bad old ways. Why? Because they can. No one is holding employers accountable for systematically underpaying women. No government agency can check up on every employer’s behavior every day of the week. Most people want to keep doing things the way they have always done them. So long as the company is still profitable, or the transportation agency is still making the trains run, or the university is still attracting paying students, then most employers will be more interested in silencing the squeaky wheel than in shaking up the corporate culture. They will keep doing things the way they’ve always been done—unless they face ongoing public scrutiny, or a real threat to their reputation and self-respect.

If you want your employer to change, you can’t simply rely on a court to impose justice from above. Ending sex discrimination requires conscious and sustained effort: from the bottom up, from the top down, and from the outside in. In Getting Even, we call this a “pressure triangle.” From the bottom up, women employees (and their male supporters) have to document discrimination, collaborate with each other, and advocate for themselves individually and for all women where they work. From the top down, CEOs (or whatever title the top boss has) must commit themselves to closing the wage gap within their organizations. And from the outside in, women at large (and their male allies) must hold every employer accountable for closing the wage gap.

Government and plaintiff bias lawyers have come up with some constructive consent decrees in the past decade. In these judgments, employers “consent” to making agreed-upon changes in their workplace, sometimes supervised for a few years by court-appointed monitors. For instance, after some of the major class action lawsuits during the past decade, some financial services companies were forced to create objective measures by which new and old accounts would be distributed. Rent-a-Center’s consent decree required the creation of a human resources department that would write and enforce fair employment policies, and whose vice president would report directly to the CEO. Home Depot agreed to create an online job application system that enables anyone who’s qualified to apply for jobs and promotions, without having to know the “right” manager. Some consent decrees impose outside monitors (preferably more than one) who review reports, check on the climate, and measure compliance.

To help consent decrees prompt lasting change within the organization, all three elements of that pressure triangle should be in place. From the bottom up, women have already documented the discrimination thoroughly; otherwise the company wouldn’t have lost the case (or settled before that could happen). Outside pressure should exist not just in the form of court oversight, but also as embarrassing media coverage and public protest by women’s organizations. Most important, the third bar of the triangle should be in place: the CEO must be persuaded to transform the organization. Why would a CEO agree to make changes? Sometimes, just to be fair. At other times, to rebuild community good will, or to woo back alienated shareholders or customers.

In other words, bringing a lawsuit will only do part of the job. To make real change, you’ll need to build allies—among other employees, with the media, and among women at large who want to close the wage gap. You don’t have to turn every payday into a national issue. But neither can you afford to tackle the big problem of workplace sex discrimination all by yourself.

Fortunately, you’re not doing this alone. Thousands of women are reading this article along with you, and many are buying the bookGetting Even, and following the action steps that are outlined in the book. Women’s groups across the country are enthusiastically taking up the effort to get women even.

Whether or not you bring charges, go to www.wageproject.org, the website of the WAGE Project. There you’ll find a host of information: about how to document and measure sex discrimination, and figure out your own wage gap; about how to start a WAGE Club that helps you and your coworkers and friends figure out what to do next; about where you might find allies; about past class action lawsuits and successful consent decrees; and much more.

(Article adapted from Getting Even: Why Women Still Don't Get Paid Like Men—And What To Do About It)

About Author:

Evelyn Murphy is the former Lt. Governor of Massachusetts—the first woman in the state’s 200 year history to hold a constitutional office. Evelyn Murphy is Founder and President of The WAGE Project, Inc. and Resident Scholar in the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University where she researched Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men and What to Do About It, by Evelyn Murphy with E.J. Graff, published by Simon & Schuster in October 2005. The WAGE Project is a national organization dedicated to getting women paid like men.

E.J. Graff, a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center, is an author and journalist. Her work appears in such publications as The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Ms., The Nation, The New Republic, The Village Voice, Salon.com, The Women’s Review of Books, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She is a senior correspondent forThe American Prospect.