Pay check fairness now

IU has a lot of women.

About 51 percent of the 32,000 undergraduate students on the Bloomington campus are women — much better than Purdue’s 43 percent, I always like to add. That’s about 16,500 ladies here at IU.

Statistics for Indiana as a whole are similar, as 50.8 percent of the population of our state is female, comparable with the national average.

Those approximately 3,350,000 Hoosier women are at a significant disadvantage to their male counterparts. Indiana ranks 40th in women’s health nationwide. Sixty-one percent of Indiana women live in a county that does not have an abortion clinic, and Indiana has many restrictions on reproductive rights.

In the workplace, women across the country make less than men for working the same jobs. Indiana is one of the worst states nationwide for women in this regard — we rank 46th in terms of the gender pay gap.

Hoosier women make 73 cents for every dollar a man makes, compared to 77 cents nationally.

In certain areas of our state, it’s even worse. Women make only 68 percent of what men make in the First Congressional district, my home district in the northwest corner of Indiana.

President Barack Obama remains committed to eradicating the pay gap across the country. Famously, the very first bill he signed into law was the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which expanded court access for women wanting to bring suit.

This week, the president signed an executive order that prevents “federal contractors from retaliating against employees who discuss their pay with each other.” Preventing employees from discussing their salaries is clearly a tactic to keep workers, especially women, in the dark about how much they make compared to others.

This hampers their ability to take action, whether in the courts or through unionization, to get fair pay for themselves.

The same executive order requires federal contractors to report how much they pay women and people of color. About one-quarter of people working in the United States work for federal contractors. Tracking these numbers will allow the government to take further positive action, if necessary.

A bill in the Senate, the Paycheck Fairness Act, goes further. It tasks the Department of Labor with “working with employers to eliminate pay disparities.” It also approves money to grant programs intended to educate women in workplace negotiation. These programs would reach not only federal contractors, as the president’s orders do, but all women in our country.

These proposals will help the women of Indiana. It is disgraceful that our state lags so far behind the rest of the country in the treatment of women in the workplace.

Women deserve to make as much as men do, and they must have access to justice if they are treated unfairly.

This struggle has continued for years. American women have made advances, but there’s still work to be done. The women graduating from IU in May will be entering a workforce where they are not yet treated equally.

Tuesday was Equal Pay Day. It’s time for the women of Indiana to get fair wages.

estahr@indiana,edu