TRANSITIONS: During its first 26 years, the
AAUW Legal Advocacy Fund offered
plaintiff support to people fighting sex discrimination in higher education through financial assistance and outreach for their cases. Many members and others who look to AAUW for our leadership have urged us to extend our LAF support beyond academia to other workplace settings. At the February 2008 joint Board meeting, Board members focused on ways to maximize the strategic impact of our investment in LAF and ensure that it is consistent with AAUW’s new Value Promise: A
s AAUW members, we belong to a community that breaks through educational and economic barriers so ALL women have a fair chance. As a result, the Board decided to expand LAF to include sex discrimination in all workplaces to reflect our commitment to that fair chance.
One way we will expand is by building on AAUW’s history of participating as
amicus curiae in cases affecting women’s rights. In collaboration with the Public Policy and Government Relations department, we will seek expanded friend of the court opportunities in cases of discrimination that disadvantage women in the workplace. With this strategy, we believe that we will maximize our effectiveness and ensure that we will be heard by courts that affirmatively want our opinion on the cases and the issues before them.
A primary way we will expand is by focusing our direct case support strategically, seeking cases that address significant issues that clearly will impact our fight for pay equity and workplaces free of sex discrimination. Like the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in the fifties, an organization that carefully selected the chronology of cases it pushed forward to ensure maximum impact, we’ll be looking to organizational partners and collaborators to help us target our considerable power and influence to strategic cases where we know AAUW’s voice will make a difference. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Thurgood Marshall knew exactly what they were doing when they championed
Brown v. Board of Education – and that model for deliberate, significant change will help guide us as we select strong cases for our support.
We know that in the next few years, we can expect that -- much like the recent Lily Ledbetter case against Goodyear Tire and Rubber -- the fight will probably be to hold onto ground that AAUW has worked hard to already secure. When Ledbetter lost at the Supreme Court, we all lost. That decision, which severely limits the ability of victims of pay discrimination to be vindicated under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, turns more than 40 years of EEOC practice and legal precedent on its head.
As we all know, AAUW has been in the fight to combat sex discrimination from the first, and now we really are going to have to fight to defend that legacy. With the court narrowing our rights, and pushing hard to rescind the gains we’ve made, strategic litigation will be critical weapon for us over the next few years.
This will be a shift for LAF, which has focused more on deserving individuals than on landmark cases with the potential to make a difference for all women. It is clear that AAUW has always had a powerful voice in the sex discrimination arena, and we need to use it to reinforce cases that will hold our ground and lead us forward.
We will proactively reach out to like-minded and highly regarded organizations. Together, we will identify cases that will not only protect the legacy AAUW members have built, but can also move us forward and truly “change the world.”
Thus, as of December 2007, LAF is no longer directly financially supporting new plaintiffs and will phase out its support of
current plaintiffs by the end of December 2008. We will, however, continue to provide travel and speaking stipends to plaintiffs and are exploring emergency relief funding to assist with the many additional burdens faced by plaintiffs (health decline, job loss, family obligations, etc). More information on this will be announced shortly.
Campus Outreach ProgramsWe will continue the successful educational initiatives of the
LAF Campus Outreach Programs in schools across the country, informing audiences about sex discrimination in higher education and strategies to prevent and combat the problem. We expect to expand our campus outreach efforts in the coming year.
Online Resource LibraryThe online
LAF Resource Library, a source for accurate background information, legal facts, statistics and credible outside resources on issues of sex discrimination, will be expanding soon. For example, a new section launched in April 2008 focused on the
Family and Medical Leave Act.
LAF will also continue to provide online legal resources to those embarking on a sex discrimination lawsuit. Some of our resources include:
If you are an attorney, social scientist or expert witness, who has experience in issues of sex discrimination, particularly in higher education, please read about the LAF Network.
For more information, e-mail laf@aauw.org or call 202/785-7719 or 800/326-AAUW.
