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  Girls Just Wanna Have Funds

  Posted Tuesday, February 10, 2009 4:10 PM | By E.J. Graff

  Sorry, Willa, to hijack your post's title for a completely different topic, but this hardly registers in today's episode of: How bad a blogger am I? I'm so bad that even though Obama signed his very first bill, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, on Jan. 28, I'm not shouting about it until today, nearly two weeks later. You, dear highly informed XX readers and bloggers, probably know all you want to know about it by now. For instance, that for decades Goodyear paid Lilly Ledbetter of Alabama 40 percent less than it paid her fellow workers (read: men) for the same job. Ledbetter sued as soon as she found out about her personal wage gap—but in 2007, the Roberts/Alito Supreme Court decided that wasn't soon enough and that Ledbetter should have sued within six months of when Goodyear started paying her unequally. (As Gail Collins wrote in the NYT, "Let us pause briefly to contemplate the chances of figuring out your co-workers' salaries within the first six months on the job.") 

  I'm proud as heck that my old boss, former Massachusetts Lt. Gov . Evelyn Murphy, was there at the signing, as she should have been. I helped research and write her book Getting Even, which launched her campaign at the WAGE Project to get women paid fairly. FYI, women working full time (i.e., not part-time workers or work-free octo-moms) still make only about 77 cents to a man's dollar. We can talk about why another time, but for now, how cool is it that the very first thing Obama endorsed with his signing pen is paycheck equality? Very cool, I say. For this we can forgive many venial stimulus sins.

  Filed under: Supreme Court, Obama, wage gap, Lilly Ledbetter

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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