In the 2009 Fair Pay Act, which was named for Lilly Ledbetter, she was purposely kept from knowing that she was being paid far less than her male colleagues for doing the exact same job. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 made this illegal, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t still go on because employers are legally allowed to keep people in the dark about what their co-workers are earning. This proposal in the OP would address that.
“So in 1979, she took a job working from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. as a shift manager and area manager at the local Goodyear plant. After being hired, Lilly was asked to sign the company contract policy that barred her from discussing pay rates with her co-workers.
In 1996, Lilly received a “Top Performance Award” but was still completely in the dark about the fact that she was paid far less for the same work as her male peers.”
“When we simply compared what the actors were paid for these films, we found that female stars earned on average US$2.2m less per film — that’s 56% less than men. But a lot of this difference can be explained by the myriad factors that determine an actor’s pay. This includes the financial success of the previous films that actors had been in, the genre of the film and the actor’s popularity (based on things like social media followers). We also controlled for differences in time spent shooting (in other words working), for the profitability of the current film, for its production budget, as well as other movie and actor characteristics.
Even when we cross-referenced the data with these various earnings determinants, we found that this explained only half of the pay gap. There was still an unexplained gender gap of more than US$1m dollars per movie, which is a 25% pay gap. This is when we control for everything that could affect the gap.”
“In fact, when men and women with the same employment characteristics do similar jobs, women earn $0.98 for every dollar earned by an equivalent man. In other words, a woman who is doing the same job as a man, with the exact same qualifications as a man is still paid two percent less.”
