CI5: Baby Mama Drama

As my first Civic Issues blog post focused on racial discrimination – this post is intended to go on to discuss gender discrimination. Gender discrimination is illegal under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as one of the 5 protected classes. To reiterate from last time, this is all due to Congress’s stretching of Article 1 of the Constitution – which lays out their powers. One of which is to regulate interstate commerce which is how they were able to justify the creation of and passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which was later tested and upheld before the Supreme Court in the case Heart of Atlanta Motel Inc v United States.

Currently, I am taking the class LER 136U which is a labor employment relations course on gender and race in the workplace. So, gender discrimination is something that I’ve been reading heavily into and learning about every monday, wednesday and friday for approximately an hour at a time. A specific book that we read in class was Selling Women Short: Gender and Money on Wall Street by Louise Marie Roth, which studied female stock brokers working on Wall Street and the issues that they face being professional women. Many of these women face wage disparity – which at the moment is the most high profile form of discrimination against women along with issues regarding pregnancy and maternity leave. While Ms. Roth’s study was controlled for educational backgrounds and upbringings, women still were making hundreds of thousands less than their male colleagues for the same work. So the question is why!? Well a theory presented in this book is because of the social atmosphere of male dominated fields – such as wall street. These environments promote networking and close relationships with clients which are often harder for women to obtain with their predominantly male clients.

Further according to the Department of Labor, many men work in positions that have higher overtime rates, leading to greater paychecks than women who mostly dominate white collar managerial positions. So the issue as of now is mainly that society has created gendered ideas of who should have what job – which then affects how much women make compared to men.

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 prevents discrimination in pay based on gender, which has been expanded multiple times. Recently President Obama expanded it by signing the Lilly  Ledbetter Fair Pay Act which cites that every disparate paycheck received is a new violation of the law. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 also expanded the Equal Rights Act of 1964 to include pregnancy women as a protected class. Pregnancy in the workplace is also an important issue because many women are told their jobs are at risk due to pregnancy despite this being discriminatory. Further undue stress in the workplace has shown to increase risk of premature birth and complications in pregnant professionals and can prove to be extremely dangerous.

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