Adapted
from Getting Even: Why Women
Still Don't Get Paid Like Men—And What
To Do About It
See
associated
article for selected sex discrimination
lawsuits and awards.
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 book Getting 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.
By
the same author:
Recent
Sex Discrimination Lawsuits and Awards
Are
You Paid As Much As A Man If He Had Your Job?
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.
About
the Writer:
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 for The American
Prospect.
Getting
Even
Why
Women Don't Get Paid Like Men—And What to Do
About It
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Sex
Discrimination: