Recently, I was listening to the Amicus podcast with Dahlia Lithwick featuring a discussion about Ruth Bader Ginsburg being one of 9 women in the 1956 entering class at Harvard Law School. There were over 500 men in the class. The dean reportedly asked women in the class, including the Notorious RBG, as the kids call her, to stand up and explain why they were at Harvard, taking the place of a man. Justice Ginsburg reportedly responded dryly that she was at Harvard because she wanted to learn more about her husband’s work. Her husband, Martin Ginsburg, was a second year law student at Harvard.
After Ginsburg completed her first two years at Harvard Law School, she moved to New York, where her husband, “Marty”, had landed a job as a tax lawyer. Harvard informed Ginsburg that she wouldn’t receive a Harvard degree if she took her final year at Columbia. Fortunately, Columbia accepted her without reservations.
Constantly pounding on the door to let women in, the Notorious RBG has made her mark over decades as a brilliant legal strategist, litigator, and judge. My favorite of her cases has got to be Lilly Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., 550 U.S. 618 (2007). In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that claims of discrimination had to be filed within 180 days of an employer’s decision to pay a woman worker less. In her eloquent dissent, Justice Ginsburg wrote:
"The Court’s insistence on immediate contest overlooks common characteristics of pay discrimination. Pay disparities often occur, as they did in Ledbetter’s case, in small increments; cause to suspect that discrimination is at work develops only over time. Comparative pay information, moreover, is often hidden from the employee’s view. Employers may keep under wraps the pay differentials maintained among supervisors, no less the reasons for those differentials. Small initial discrepancies may not be seen as meat for a federal case, particularly when the employee, trying to succeed in a non-traditional environment, is averse to making waves."
On January 29, 2009, President Barak Obama’s first act was to sign the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, curing the conservative court’s oversight by legislatively overturning it.
By the time the Notorious RBG graduated from law school she could expect to make 61 cents for every $1 a man made. While the earnings gap has narrowed and women now earn 81 cents for every dollar, it is still a long way off from equal pay.
In the U.S., the gender pay gap remains a reality for many women. Based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for the second quarter of 2019, full-time salaried women workers earned just 81.5% of what men earned. Women earned a median of $821 weekly in 2019, while men earned $1,007. And it’s worse for women of color when compared to white men. Black women earn 68.0% and Latinas earn 62.0% of what white men earn.
Of course, men still earn more than women at every age as well. In fact, men’s salaries continue rising for over a decade after women’s have peaked: Women hit their peak earning age at 44, while men achieve their highest earnings at age 55.
Employment litigation claims relative to gender pay are one of today’s hottest topics. If this is a concern of one of your clients, I’m happy to help flush out the facts and details by conducting a thorough neutral investigation with the goal of facilitating a cost saving early resolution.
I pray for Justice Ginsburg every morning. And I am reminded of her words: “Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.” Join me as we together walk forward, step by step.
