Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), who enforced both the 1963 Equal Pay Act and the 1964 Civil Rights Act as the first woman to chair the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), today introduced the Fair Pay Act of 2015 (FPA), to help eliminate the gender wage gap by requiring that if men and women are doing comparable work, they are to be paid comparable wages. The FPA would allow women to prove that some or all of their wage disparity is gender-based where jobs are comparable but not identical to men's jobs. Norton introduced her bill today, April 14, which is Equal Pay Day, marking the day of the year a woman on average has to work to earn what a man earned by the end of last year. Norton is also an original sponsor of the Paycheck Fairness Act, which was introduced in March. That bill updates the Equal Pay Act by allowing class actions, allowing employees to share information about work without retaliation by employers, and, in other ways, conforming the EPA to procedures reflected in other civil rights statutes.
"Although we have made significant progress in closing the gender wage gap since Congress passed the 1963 Equal Pay Act, that bill needs major overhauling and updating," Norton said. "That is why I have cosponsored the Paycheck Fairness Act. However, beyond the continuing failure by many employers to pay equal pay for equal work, part of the wage gap results from women being trapped and segregated into careers that pay lower wages than those dominated by men who do comparable work. For example, if a woman is an emergency services operator, a female-dominated profession, she should not be paid less than a fire dispatcher, a male-dominated profession, simply because each of these jobs has been dominated by one sex. We need solutions to disparities like this, which can be rooted out only when we strive to undo deep-rooted wage discrimination engrained in female-dominated professions."