Lilly Ledbetter and Other Household Names

Jan. 30, 2009 - “This is a wonderful day” President Obama said by way of introduction to the signing of his first bill on Thursday morning, the Fair Pay Restoration Act. He introduced Lilly Ledbetter, who entered the room at his side. A blonde, white woman of a certain age (to quote the French, who have a delicate way of softening the ragged edges of maturity), she smiled and was responsive but didn’t have a speaking role. This former factory worker from Alabama seemed at once significant and ordinary, which immediately brought Rosa Parks to mind, another otherwise unremarkable woman who simply wanted to go about her daily work with no deliberate intention of leaving an imprint on American history.

Lilly didn’t visibly react when Obama explained that it is estimated that she has irretrievably lost some $200,000 over her career in salary, pension and Social Security payments because of the years of systematic underpayment she has experienced. To her, that’s apparently water under the bridge. 

How would you take this news? Are you absolutely certain that you’ve been paid equitably throughout your career?

As for me, Lilly’s case is making me squirm, because I know that I’ve occasionally been at the receiving end of inequitable pay practices. I learned this early in my career when the DOL intervened on the behalf of a group of us (all women, most of us mothers working as highly skilled, hourly researchers) who had been deliberately and illegally denied the overtime pay to which we were too ignorant to know we were entitled. Fortunately, one of our team entered law school and woke up, alerting the Feds. 

The second time I brushed up against this reality was years later, when I accepted a reasonably high-level job offer with a starting salary that was only too obviously based on my answer to the question “What salary do you require?” I conjured up the biggest number I could possibly imagine, and was immediately given that sum. I instinctively knew that I had made a tactical error, a suspicion that deepened over time, based on vibrations received via that gold standard of corporate communication, the one mechanism by which all truly useful knowledge and subterranean insight is transmitted – the grapevine. I have no credible data although I requested it once and was denied, amid lengthy explanations about how education and experience and a host of other factors render the raw numbers “meaningless.” BTW, I entered the job with a master’s degree and 15+ years of extremely relevant experience for a job description requesting significantly less on both fronts. Does any of this sound familiar?

Have you ever asked for the comparative compensation for everyone in your peer group to ascertain where you stand? Try it. If you did receive this information, was it within a timely fashion, say a month or two of your hire or promotion? Did curiosity (or annoyance) about a potential pay gap trump your excitement over beginning a new job or receiving a promotion?

Suffice it to say, I personally am celebrating the Pay Equity for Women Act, because if I couldn’t have met the stringent burden of proof required by an employee in the law that preceded Ledbetter, then I know beyond a doubt that Lilly didn’t stand a chance.

Footnote: I have encountered one and only one employer who prominently posted everyone’s salary on their cubicle walls, eliminating any mysteries about who made what. I kid you not; I witnessed this practice with my own eyes, although this goes back some years. That was Mars, the candy company headquartered in New Jersey. Privately held, the Mars brothers were considered eccentric in many ways, but they did not lack courage.

What are you seeing and hearing about current approaches to achieving pay equity? Is this entirely a women’s issue?  

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of WorldatWork and its affiliate, Alliance for Work-Life Progress (AWLP).