Introduction

Abstract

In June of 2012, the US Congress rejected a bill that would have given working women rights to information about differential pay. The 2012 Paycheck Fairness Act would have required employers in the United States to prove that pay inequality was based on qualifications, performance, levels of education, or other considerations unrelated to gender, and it would have opened workplace gender discrimination, based on this newly available information, to litigation. The vote in the Senate was mainly along party lines, 52 to 47, short of the 60 votes the Democrats would have needed to avoid a filibuster. The consensus in the media was that the vote was an election-year spectacle that the Democrats knew had no chance of winning even as they appealed to the media for coverage, as the Democrats were aiming to woo women voters and force Republicans to explain at the polls why they supported gender pay inequality. A similar bill in 2010 had a similar fate, with the Democrats falling two votes short of passage, as Ben Nelson, Democrat from Nebraska, switched ranks and joined the Republicans. In 2012, in face of the Democrats’ accusation that the Republicans were “waging a war on women,” the Republicans cited two rationales: that in a time of unemployment at over 8 percent, the Democrats were trying to pass a “job killing” bill; and that the Democrats’ bill would be a boon for trial lawyers. In such a climate, treating women unfairly, then, must be acceptable, such rationales assume, because anybody should be grateful for a job regardless of the conditions or discrimination.