Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

It might be better to call today Equal Pay Day 2008 instead of Equal Pay Day 2009. Why? Because the average American woman would have to add the wages she has earned thus far this year to her wages from 2008 in order to catch up with the average American man’s 2008 earnings. 

Progress has been made: when the Equal Pay Act passed in 1963, women earned 59 cents for every dollar made by men; today it’s 78 cents. The Lilly Ledbetter Act, which Obama signed in January, made it easier for women to be able to sue for past discrimination by giving them more time to file. The Paycheck Fairness Act, which would close loopholes in the Equal Pay Act while protecting employees who discuss wage information and increasing the remedies available; this bill has passed the house, but you still need to remind your Senators about its importance.

Such legislation will not be enough to truly achieve equal pay, however. It is also necessary to make sure that women have equal access to high-paying professions (which means making sure that women continue their educational gains and generally working to fight the gender biases that undermine women when it comes to interviews and promotions) while, at the same time, working to make sure that female-dominated professions are appropriately compensated. An easy example is that, even when the economy is booming, teachers should earn more than Wall Street bankers; pushing around numbers to create wealth for some people should not be valued more than helping youth become critically engaged citizens—though those teachers who do have that goal in mind often find themselves struggling against the current educational.

But I digress. A more challenging area is domestic work. A more equitable division of unpaid labor in heterosexual couples would offer women engaged in those relationships more opportunities to pursue careers that require long hours, but that’s not the whole story. There’s also the issue of upper-to-middle class (mostly white) women carving out careers alongside (mostly white) men while less wealthy women, usually women of color, watch their children for a relatively low wage. Efforts like the New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights can help make some immediate improvements in the lives of these workers, though they cannot alleviate the problematic irony.

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• Bipart bad, reason #2905: Equal pay for equal work passed House (bilerico.com)
• House Passes 2 Measures on Job Bias (nytimes.com)
• House passes legislation fighting wage discrimination. (thinkprogress.org)
• Equal Pay For Equal Work? (womenshealthmag.com)
• House vote will allow lawsuits for equal pay (americablog.com)
• The Lilly Ledbetter Not Cheat Your Workers Act (plastic.com)