The XX Factor: What women really think.

Keep Your Hands Off My ... Paycheck

But I think the question is: What's the goal? Are you trying to have the best possible career, when you can easily find a comparable job elsewhere? Moving on may be best for your sanity. Are you stuck in a job—say, because you're a single mother in a recession-stunned region, with few other options? Register your complaint—but have allies within and outside the company before you do.

Or if your harasser is predatory, serially making life miserable for one woman after another, and you want to put a stop to it, not just for your own sake but for everyone's? Please, please, file with HR, and also go to the EEOC and file your complaint! Do not leave that man in place. Maria Hinojosa, at NOW on PBS, recently talked to some teens who took their companies to court and won. Making the company pay also puts other employers on notice: The cost of replacing your supervisor is less than the cost of fighting your lawsuit.

No matter what you do, your encounter with sexual harassment—which takes you away from full career concentration for however long you're worrying about avoiding your harasser's hands and hostility—is part of why we have a wage gap. On  average—in every job category—women working full-time make less than men working full-time, as the New York Times shows so beautifully here. Forget what men do to women on the job for a few months before you quit or complain: What's really disgusting is making a quarter or a third less than your male peers.

Ledbetter and Ginsburg and a Cheer for the Feisty Gals

EJ, one other thing about Ledbetter: Obama’s signing of the act came just days before the announcement that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. While Ginsburg appears to be recovering nicely from her surgery, the announcement last week brought a rash of speculation about who might replace her. I am not prepared to even think along those lines, but I am prepared to speculate that without Ginsburg’s lifelong commitment to women’s equality and her passionate (and very personal) dissent in the Ledbetter case, the issue of pay parity would not have blossomed into the national Ledbetter tsunami that helped sweep Obama into office in November. Ginsburg is not a diva, but when she read the majority opinion in Ledbetter, she went as close as she goes to ballistic; begging the court for just a sliver of reality-based thinking. She gave those of us who know that pay discrimination rarely comes with an embossed card explaining that you’re being screwed, a charge to fix the court’s mistake. I believe that as Ginsburg has gotten older and gone from being one of two women on the court to the only woman on the court, she’s come to understand that sometimes making a little noise is the most ladylike thing to do. The passage of the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is ultimately a tribute to her as much as anyone.

Girls Just Wanna Have Funds

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.

Why, Exactly, Is Sexual Harassment—er, Sexual Terrorism—OK?

To your point: I am sorry you had such a brutal work environment, and sorry that the sexuality was "the least of it." I understand that low-wage jobs are brutal. Many in my extended family, and from my high school, have worked or do work Nickel-and-Dimed jobs: trucking, waitressing, cashiering, retail, construction. (Although the men's jobs regularly pay more than the women's.) Glad you don't have to live that way now.

But I have to say, reading your post, I'm not exactly sure why you think sexual harassment is OK. Because it's the least of it? Um, not always. And why should anyone have to tolerate the kind of sexual harassment that's brutal, grinding, daily terrorism? Consider the experience of a teen who worked at a Pizza Hut, whose co-worker rubbed his, um, "private parts" (as she put it in the deposition that I read) against her bottom whenever she was at the cash register, who held a knife to her throat when demanding sex and then said he was "just kidding," who threw her to the floor and dry-humped her and would have actually raped her except that the manager walked in. When the teen complained, her manager cut her hours.

Or the Peerless Park, Mo., Burger King workers whom I talked with at length, who were so traumatized by similar daily grindings and attempted assaults that one—call her "Ellen," because she asked me for pseudonymity—told me that whenever she saw a car like that of her former manager, she stopped being able to breathe, and had to go immediately home and lock herself in the house for a day. This was two years later. She'd never heard the term PTSD, and when I gently suggested counseling—although that's not a journalist's place!—she told me she couldn't afford it.  

Or how about the Montgomery, Ill., Dial factory cleaning woman who was assaulted by her manager—by assaulted, I mean an attempted rape that was interrupted when someone else came into the room (I read excerpts of this sworn testimony too)—in a case in which 100 different women went on the record about such horrific harassment as being stalked and threatened; grabbed by the crotch and lifted into the air; or circled by men on the factory floor, grabbed, their heads shoved toward some guy's unzipped crotch. Or was that last one the Ford case? Or Eveleth Taconite? Or Mitsubishi? Sorry, I have talked to so many of these women, and read the depositions and written testimony in so many of these lawsuits, that I get them mixed up. They're brutal. They're designed to keep women in the lower-paying jobs on the ladder. They're inexcusable.

And I haven't even gotten into what happens to women in the financial services industry—it's too gross to post. For the ugly details, check out Susan Antilla's stunning book, Tales from the Boom-Boom Room.

All this should be illegal. Oh wait—it is!—because it alters the "terms and conditions" of keeping a job, based on a woman's sex, making it impossible for her to earn a fair living.

The good news: Rachel Spicuglia got her job back. The bad news: Hundreds of thousands of other women still have to fend off exhausting and dehumanizing sexualized threats if they want to keep bringing home their skinny pink paychecks. And in a bad economy, that's very bad news for women. 

Waitress Loses Job Because She Was Sexually Assaulted. Ho-Hum, Another Day of Working While Female!

While we wonder whether our sensitivity to sexist press coverage of elite women candidates is a good or bad sign—thanks and welcome to XX Factor, Eve—ordinary working women out there are still losing their jobs because some guy thinks their breasts double as doorknobs, available for anyone to squeeze. Check out Rebekah Spicuglia's painfully specific post about how her sister lost her waitressing job at Chili's. Notice the very best part:

When my sister, Rachel Spicuglia, a five-year employee of Chili's Restaurant (owned by Brinker International), reported to her manager the escalating sexual harassment she was receiving from the cooks, which had culminated in an assault that morning in the walk-in refrigerator, the manager asked Rachel if the offending employee had gotten a "full cup" when he had grabbed her breasts.

I post this not because this case is unusual, but precisely because it isn't. This one just happens to be written up publicly. As I found while collaborating on Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even, American companies shell out millions upon millions of dollars each year to make up for truly vile sexual harassment—assault, groping, stalking, and deeply disgusting daily comments. Waitresses in particular should get hazard pay. And the waitress cases aren't as bad as the ones I read involving aspiring electricians, videographers, higher-paid factory workers, women in finance, and other cases in which women try to get "men's" jobs—those stories start reading like terror on the job. 

I'll write more about this another day but reading this just now on HuffPo, I snapped. According to the largest and most credible study—of the federal workforce—approximately 3 percent of women report being sexually assaulted at work. That's millions of women a year. The lower down the food chain you are, the more likely you will be harassed—holding down your earnings significantly while you fight or flee. Which is why sexual harassment is against the law, by the way—because it stops women from earning a fair living.

Why should so many women have to risk their bodily integrity just to feed their families?

Carolyn Maloney Does Fine on Colbert (And Why, Again, Do I Care?)

Was Carolyn Maloney not adorable on Colbert last night? She has a new book out, Rumors of our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated, about how little the wage gap has narrowed over the years—and what is the glass ceiling made of, Plexiglas? But Maloney did break one barrier last night, becoming the first member of Congress I've seen on that show who actually seemed to get the joke, understand the deal, and have ever heard of the program prior to appearing on it. So the laugh was not on her when she kept right on pitching Obama while Stephen pretended to use a breast pump that sounded more like a buzz saw—supposedly to show how right employers are to fire lactating women for distracting their co-workers. And when he asked for guidance on the proper way to compliment a subordinate on her great breasts, Maloney didn't fume like all those unfortunates who'd come on before her, whose passive-aggressive aides seemed to have forgotten to brief them. Nor did she play along to her own detriment, like that ninny Robert Wexler, who Colbert got to say that of course he loves cocaine and prostitutes. She was funny, but without making an ass of herself. And I guess it's a sign of how far we still have to go that I actually found myself feeling relieved.

Emily, your post on relating to Michelle Obama because you both grew up grooving on the Brady Bunch seems like exactly the sort of response that Bill Bishop (also hawking a book, The Big Sort) was talking about on Jon Stewart last night when he said we don't actually vote on issues any more. Instead, having organized our whole lives around sticking to our own kind, politically speaking, we tend to go for the candidate who most reminds us of ... us. "We vote lifestyles,'' he said, in response to campaigns designed to hold a mirror in front of the voter and say pssst, "Vote for you!'' Not that you're going to base your vote on the Marcia Brady connection or anything. (And thank goodness, because Michelle was really more of a Jan.) Even after all that has been written on the role emotion plays in our electoral decisions, there's still more to this than we'd like to admit. But enough of this, or authors are going to be calling my house at all hours trying to get me to stay up late more often.