A Brief History of Pay Inequity

During World War I, women were first guaranteed pay equity in the form of regulations enforced by the War Labor Board of 1918. The Board's equal pay policy required manufacturers, who put women on the payroll while male employees were serving in the military, to pay those women the same wages that were paid to the men. (War Labor Reports, National War Labor Board: Its Establishment and Historical Setting, at x-xi (1942))

During World War II, a large number of American women took jobs (most for the first time) outside the home. Many of these women worked in the war industries, and in 1942 the National War Labor Board urged employers to make “adjustments which [would] equalize wage or salary rates paid to females with the rates paid to males for comparable quality and quantity of work on the same or similar operations.” (War Labor Reports, at vii (1945))

The first bill prohibiting pay discrimination against women was called the "Women's Equal Pay Act of 1945" and was introduced by Senators Pepper and Morse on June 21, 1945. (S. 1178, 79th Cong., 1st Sess. (1945)) The bill was not passed. Bills were introduced every year but were not passed because they called for equal pay for comparable work. (4 County of Washington v. Gunther, 452 U.S. 161, 185 n. 1 (1981)) (Rehnquist, dissenting)) “Comparable work” is the theory of providing equal compensation for different jobs in the same organization or community based on a comparison of the intrinsic worth and/or difficulty of the job. (Id. at 166.)

Until the early 1960s, advertisements for job listings were separated by sex. Almost all of the higher level jobs were for men, and some ads for the exact same job would offer different pay for men and women.

In 1963, women earned 58.9% of the wages men earned. (U.S. Women's Bureau and the National Committee on Pay Equity) On June 10, 1963 John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act (EPA) into law to become effective on June 11, 1964. (Equal Pay Act of 1963 (29 U.S.C. § 206) With the EPA it became illegal to pay women lower wages than men based solely on their sex.

Despite the passage of the EPA over forty years ago, women still do not earn equal wages. In 2002, women earned 76.6% of men’s wages, which is only an improvement of less than half a penny a year since 1963. (U.S. Women's Bureau and the National Committee on Pay Equity.)

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