Leveling Up: A Brief History of Women’s Pay Equity

If you have been following along with the Courage Campaign these past few months, you might be thinking, how are we still here? It’s 2024, and we’re talking about equitably compensating the majority of the American workforce!

But zoom out and it becomes clear that we have actually made significant progress in a shockingly short period–only about the last sixty years. Have women been advocating for equal pay for centuries? Yep. The “second wave” of the women’s rights movement, as it’s often called, is built on the foundation of women’s suffrage and activism that dates back to the 1800s. But in 1960, women were still quite limited in their rights. We’ve done quite a bit in these last few decades:

In 1960, the FDA approved the first-ever birth control pill. The pill was championed by Margaret Sanger and funded by heiress Katherine McCormick, and for the first time gave women control of when they would have children. While this was not done as a pay parity move, it is perhaps “step zero” along our walk through pay equity history.

Step one happened on June 10th, 1963–only sixty years ago–when the Equal Pay Act was signed into law. This law prohibited paying two employees of different genders differently when they worked the same job, at the same establishment, under the same working conditions–and excluded all white collar workers and contractors. The Equal Pay Act spent nineteen years in Congress after its original introduction in 1944 by Congresswoman Winifred Stanley. In the 60’s, when it finally passed, women were making roughly 60 cents to the dollar earned by a man in a comparable job. The Equal Pay Act was reinforced and strengthened by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, of which Title VII banned gender discrimination in hiring practices.

In 1972, Title IX banned gender discrimination in education and all federally funded activities. Many programs had to rescind their quotas limiting the number of women admitted to graduate school, professional endeavors, and more. One of the principal authors of this legislation was Patsy Mink, the first woman of color in Congress!

In 1974, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act allowed women to finally open bank accounts without needing a signature from husbands or fathers. They were also allowed to have credit cards in their own name.

In fourteen short years, women gained rights over their bodies, the chance to protect their own finances, and the rights (on paper) to be educated, hired, and paid equally to a man. That is an insane pace of progress for women’s rights!

Over the next thirty years, women claimed positions into which they had never been allowed: first women in space, first women in several major government positions, and first CEO of a Fortune 500 company, to name a few.

From left to right: Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, and Katharine Graham, the first women to hold a CEO position for a Fortune 500 company.

But since 1794, in some ways the gender pay equity movement has plateaued. The gender pay gap has not gotten smaller in the past twenty years, the Equal Rights Amendment has languished in legislature for over a century, and many of the advances made to support women’s rights have happened sporadically at the state or local level, leaving women in some cultural and political climates within our country unprotected. 

Perhaps rather than stalling out, we have been quietly leveling up.

Rather than looking at women as a single monolith, often paying attention to primarily or only cis straight white women, and certainly historically ignoring all other minoritized genders, society has taken a more nuanced lens to the topic of pay equity. We have done research on intersectionality in pay inequity, and worked to get non-white, non-cis, non-married women and people of minoritized genders onto a more level playing field.

As the movement becomes more diverse and nuanced, it can be easy to lose sight of the big picture. And when we do look up at it, it seems to be the same picture we would be seeing in the eighties. But we know that in the details, there is much more rich color and depth to this picture than was there at the end of the last century.

It’s up to us now to push for inclusive policy change. That often means advocating for some smaller intersectional subset of the whole population of underpaid people of minoritized genders, knowing that many others out there in the world are pushing in parallel for other subsets of our group.

We also have the opportunity as individuals to look at how policy and culture in multiple arenas impact our own navigation of career and compensation. We can look to more than just federal mandates against discrimination in hiring and payment on the basis of gender.

Over the coming months, the Courage Campaign will be sharing a collection of resources to serve this purpose. We aim to give you a toolkit to answer questions like:

• How do I figure out if I’m being paid fairly? How do I figure out if there is a gender-based imbalance in pay in my workplace?

• What does the formal legal process look like to tackle a discrimination-based pay inequity case? Which professionals will I need on my team?

• How can I take more informal steps to shift work culture and advocate for myself to raise my pay to what I deserve?

• And more!

While our Pay Equity Toolkit will help you navigate your individual encounters with pay inequity, we will also highlight some of the many organizations working toward policy change and community support to achieve pay equity at a larger scale.

To find these resources, follow The Courage Campaign webpage and WIS PDX on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Author Bio

Arielle Isakharov (she/her) is a Neuroscience PhD Candidate researching cell development and neuronal identity in the retina. When not pipetting, she is advocating for equity within her program and university across racial and gender lines. Arielle has volunteered with WIS PDX in several capacities and is excited to learn and share more about gender pay inequities by contributing to the Courage Campaign. Her non-scientific interests include crafting, reading, and eating sushi.