The first equal paid debate in the US started way back in the eighteen sixties, and it ended in the most American of ways, with a sex scandal. It was a huge It was a huge scandal. That's Jessica Zappero. She wrote This Grand Experiment, a book about when women first went to work in the federal government in eighteen sixty one, at the start of the Civil War. The government is running out of money to pay federal workers.
It needs cheap labor. The Treasure of the US at the time is Francis Spinner, and he has this great idea higher women. When he went and inspected the treasury, he found men performing tasks that he thought were better suited to and more cheaply performed by women. Spinner is trying to keep costs down, so he goes out and offers women six hundred dollars a year for these jobs, half of what the met are making. It's the first time the government hires women, and it's a big opportunity.
He gets tons of applicants. At first, women are happy to have the jobs, but even then d C was an expensive place to live, and they soon start agitating for more money. They petitioned Congress. They write letters to newspapers like this one, which ran in the New York Times in early eighteen sixty nine. Very few persons denied a justice of the principle that equal work should command equal pay without regard to the sex of the labor. But it is one thing to acknowledge the right of
a principle, and quite another to practice it. Women are known to be as good printers, teachers, telegraph clerks, etcetera. As men, but fewer occupations are open to them. Their necessity for employment is greater. Therefore their services can be obtained for less. They say, we're doing the same job. It's galling to watch men continue to get raises when they're already earning so much and we're doing the exact same job. Why are we different? What makes us to
differ from them? It's a reasonable question, and Congress doesn't dismiss them. By eight seventy a handful of bills have been introduced that would give women equal pay for equal work. The US government had officially taken up the equal pay debate. This is where that sex scandal comes in. It's the first time men and women are working together, and while there's some romance. A few relationships become public and it's a huge deal. Newspapers cover it, politicians talk about it.
It's so notable that guide books to DC make sure visitors know about it. It's impossible to tell how many of these female clerks are pure women or how many impure. The black sheep are greatly in the minority, but are still believed to be numerous. It's delicious gossip, and it creates this idea that women working at the Treasury get paid not to do clerical work, but to be sexually available to men. Essentially, as far as some people are concerned,
this is government sanctioned prostitution. As Congress is debating equal pay, one faction brings those up. You have been saying, we shouldn't be employing women at all. They're all prostitutes. Why are we even talking about this. We should just fire all of them. None of the equal pay bills pass, and it's partly because of this thinking. This is really significant. It sets the standard for the next hundred fifty years.
This is how women enter the professional workforce from their private companies also start to hire women to do clerical work, and taking a queue from the government, they pay them less, and perhaps had the federal government equally rewarded male and female labor at this point, maybe private labor would have paid them better as well. But instead Congress sent this clear mess age that it was acceptable to treat women as exploitable and marginal employees and to women themselves that
they were fundamentally inferior to men. When you look at the world, you know what the population like. Where is our place like? Where is our value? Wodn deserve people for equal work? The gender lie helps to keep women not on a pedestal but in a cage. First, have you've done for the women according to the promises of the platform. I'm sure we haven't done enough. And then I'm glad that you reminded the other thing. Get a power equalization between the sexes women? What do they want?
We want to end gender inequality, and to do this we need everyone involved. The government's policy is that women should get the same pay that men get or similar work. And here are the all male nominees. Welcome back to the pay Check. I'm Rebecca Greenfield. In this episode, we're going to explain why that nineteenth century sex scandal still matters. It established women in the workforce as cheap labor from day one. A big part of the pay gap has
to do with what's called occupational sorting. This is the idea that even today, women still do women's work their teachers, nurses, secretaries, and those jobs pay less. This is what happens when you have a hundred years of rules and laws that dictate what women can and can't do, laws based on the idea that women, because we can have babies, are
fundamentally different from men. Take those treasury secretaries. They just wanted equal pay for equal work, but that question quickly turned into a debate about whether women should really just stay home and what would happen if we didn't. This idea that women's biology and sexuality dictate what we should and shouldn't do for work comes up again and again. I asked my colleague Claire Sebteth to talk with me about how this idea has played out over time and
what it has to do with the pay gap. Hi Clarik, Hi Becca. Okay, so take me back to the sixties. Why was it such a big deal for these women to be working well? Up until this point, for the most part, women weren't really working at least not for pay. I mean, the sixties is the decade where slavery is abolished, so many black women aren't even free. So when we talk about women working for pay, we're largely talking about white women. And maybe if they're single, they might be
a teacher or a governess. But for the most part, they got married and stayed home and had kids. They had a lot of kids. I think the average around that time was about seven per mother. This was also a time period, by the way, when women were quite literally thought of as the weaker sex, the weaker sex. What does that mean. It means essentially that people thought women were not as intelligent or hard working or able
to do things as well as men. There's this really famous quote from a brief by Lewis Brandeis and I know it before he became a Supreme Court justice, and he talks about this and these are his thoughts, but they are representative of pretty much everyone's thought. Women are fundamentally weaker than men in all that makes for endurance, in muscular strength, in nervous energy, and he powers of
persistent attention and application. He also goes on to talk later in this brief about how women shouldn't even hold jobs that require them to stand for long hours because their feet were delicate and their legs weren't quote good sustaining columns. Okay, so women are just not fit to work. They're either pregnant having children, or just like their bodies aren't made for it. Yeah, or their feet are small.
But what if women need to make money? Obviously, even at this time, even among the people who who hold these beliefs, they do know that women do sometimes have to make money themselves. They could be widowed, their husbands could be too sick, or you know, God forbid, they could be single. So they started to pass these laws saying, Okay, how do we fit these weaker beings into the workforce. The laws that they passed are called protective laws. And I don't know about you, but I had never heard
of this when I first started reading about it. So I found a historian to explain it to me. I'm Nancy Wallack. I'm research scholar and Arner History Department, and I specialized in American history and especially in American women's history. What were they protecting women from? It's always changing in the progressive ye or of women. Reformers did advocate the laws on the basis of of of women's work in
the in the home. They valued women's work as home maker, said, as mothers and wife more than they of roles as workers. You want to preserve women's health so that they can have healthy children, which is good for society. That wasn't essentially the legal the legal documents. There were a ton of these laws, and they got really specific. Ohio, for instance, had twenty two laws to keep women out of specific forms of work, not just minds, but also elevator operators,
crossing guards. Why couldn't women be elevator operators? The idea was that if a woman worked as an elevator operator and she ran a man up to his apartment late at night, something untoward might happen. So some places said no elevator operators. In New York City actually said okay, you can be an elevator operator, um, but women just can't work past ten pm. So that also took care of women in bars or restaurants or anything like that.
They were essentially protecting women from getting in situations where something bad might have up into them. But at the same time they were also kind of protecting men from these wanton women who would be a late night elevator operators. We just can't conceive of women outside of their sexuality. Basically, they're either at home having babies or outside having sex. They can't just be an elevator operator doing their job. No, absolutely not. How do these laws play into what women earn?
You have all these women who do need money, they need to work, but you have this limited list of jobs that they can hold. So you essentially get this supply and demand problem. You have way more women wanting to work than they can. If you're an employer, that's great for you because you don't have to pay them that much because there's always going to be some other woman willing to accept the lower pay. She goes through
the mill of New York eight hundred employment funerals. She learns that although lots of jobs are listed, there are ten applicants for each one, girls with city references and city experience. But are you sure you're han't got something for me? We don't take any series. Good? What about race? This is all happening just a few decades after slavery is abolished, right, Yeah, so black people were limited in
the jobs they can and cannot do by law. It was even more explicit and more segregated than law is created for women. And you essentially have the economy divided up into these, you know, jobs that are appropriate for white men, jobs that are appropriate for black men, white women,
black women. And this occupational sorting that we have now you can trace it back to this time period where even today, black women are twice as likely as white women to hold service industry jobs, right because back then they weren't even allowed to hold the better paying jobs. And that was true for anybody who wasn't white. So that's kind of where we are. And things only really start to change because they have to our Gundry and Berrol.
The women of America rallied to the support of the So I know about World War Two, men enter the workforce in large numbers, and we have Rosie the Riveter and women going into factories. Yeah, and it's not that we have Rosie the Riveter. We have two and a half million Rosie the Riveters. And here in this almost the last rate industry we thought could be handled only by men, these mothers, wives and sweethearts came to stand
shoulder to shoulder with them in almost every capacity. Women entered the labor force in huge numbers in a way that they never had before, and they were holding jobs that had previously, because of these laws, been thought inappropriate for them. Were they getting paid equally at that time? It's interesting because if you're a factory owner and all your workers go off to war and you start hiring
women and paying them less. When your workers come back from more, are you going to pay them their old wages that are higher or are you going to stick with the lower wages you've been paying women. So labor unions actually started lobbying for equal pay less because they were concerned about women. Then they were concerned about the men returning from war getting their old wages. Is this all women? No, it's not all women. This was largely
just for white women. Technically, President Roosevelt outlawed racial discrimination in the war industry, but it was pretty inconsistent, and things really only opened up for black people towards the end of the war when they're just really weren't enough white people to fill all the jobs. What happens when the men come back. Women have shown what they could do in war, and now that the fighting is over, women intend to show the world what they can do
in peace. When the men come back, the protective laws come back. Wait, the protective laws came back. Yeah, they actually had been in place the whole time. They just were usually written with this little clause saying, you know, in case of emergency, we don't have to do this. And the world ward who was definitely an emergency. So men come back. The women get pushed out of the workforce. Also, very quickly you end up going from you know, of auto industry workers in were women and two years later
it's eight percent. It's like boom, So you get from Rosie the riveter to leave it to Beaver. Essentially, when do the protective laws go away? They go away when two things happen. The first is a smaller step, it seems really big at the time. The Democratic track Boom in which you ran, promises to work for if they
right for women and footing equal pay. I must say I am a strong believer in equal pay, here for equal work, and I think that we are to work do better than we're doing in President Kennedy signs the Equal Pay Act, which means that a woman holding any job has to be paid the same as a man. But that just means of a job that she's already holding. It doesn't mean that you have to allow her to hold any job whatsoever. That happens because of the Civil
Rights Act. And actually it sort of happens by accident, which is something that has sort of been lost to history, but I talked to Nancy about it. The accident was the addition of sex to Title seven of the nine Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act was protecting people against racial discrimination, and Title seven of the Civil Rights
Act as racial discrimination at work. First, at least a decade, UH southern congressman had been trying to add a provision about sex too civil Rights Acts in order to UH topple the Acts. They would say, okay, well, if you want us to treat everyone, you know, equally according to race, what if we treat women equally too, And people would say, well, that's ridiculous, and so then all the bills would just die.
So for this comes up again, a Virginia congressman does the same thing that had worked in the past, but this time lawmakers on the other side called this bluff. They were like, fine, we'll treat women equally. So the word sex gets added to the Civil Rights Act, the law passes, and then boom, Women can, in theory anyway,
hold any job that they want to. So we end a discrimination basically on a dare Yeah, And when you think about it, essentially that means we passed this law, this very big law, changing something quite fundamental in our economy, without really believing all the stuff behind it. So for the next fifty years we've essentially been fighting about what that means. The Equal Pay Act and the Civil Rights
Act were really important. Women are no longer barred from working in the most lucrative fields, and once we get to those fields, we're supposed to get equal pay for that work. Those two pieces of legislation did a lot to bring women's pay more in line with what men were earning. But it doesn't end there because now businesses have to comply with the laws, and in a lot of cases that means they have to change the way
they operate, and they don't like that. They don't want to be told who they can or can't hire and how much they have to pay them or not pay them. They want the flexibility to do whatever they think will make them the most money. And companies argue, literally, are you because they get sued and defend themselves in court
that they have business reasons for discriminating. For example, in the late nineteen sixties, it was pretty common for the airlines to require flight attendants to be female and single. When they got married, they got fired. When United Airlines got sued, the airline defended its practice in court by saying the irregularity inherent and stewardess as work schedules, was in compatible with the women's role in married life. Businesses push and push against the constraints of the Civil Rights Act,
and they haven't stopped, but sometimes women push back. My name is Lily led Better and a lis in Jacksonville, Alabama. In two thousand nine, right after Barack Obama took office, he signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. It was the first piece of legislation he signed, and it closed a legal technicality that companies you to work around with the Civil Rights Act. Claire talked to Lily about what it was like to win on the facts and lose
on a technicality. Today, Lily is eighty years old, but in her younger years she worked at a good Year tire plan in gads In, Alabama for twenty years. She made tires mainly the first job I had. I had three tubers, one produced trader or powers. That meant having the right former, having the right rubber, the rock chemicals. She liked good year. She had a four oh one K. She had benefits, She got time and a half when
she worked over time. She'd worked her way up to manager and was closing out on a retirement which would come with a pension. Then one day at work, someone's up to paper into her employee mailbox. To this day, she has no idea who wrote it. And it had four names, it had had three man In mind, somebody has told me what all of our base pay is. Those names on the paper were all managers, just like Lily, but she was making up to forty less than them.
Lily thought about those numbers, social Security, her pension. They were all tied to her salary. I got home, I told my husband, I said I have to go to Birmingham, Alabama and follow a charge with an equal employma combition because this is not right. And he said, well, what time you want to leave. Lily found a lawyer and
in two thousand three they went to trial. She had a strong case and she won They had a four by eight wild board drawed off with all of the male's names and my name in the tower room where I worked, in our starting pay and our ending pay, all the three the years. And I mean, you could just sit there and study those numbers, and you knew, you knew even the lowest rated man. There was one guy rated a little lower than me, but man, his salary was twice mine. The jury awarded Lily three point
eight million dollars. The judge reduced it to three hundred sixty thousand, but it was obvious to everyone that Lily hadn't been paid as much as the men who held the same job for accompanying the size of goodyear. Three sixty thousand wasn't a lot of money, but they didn't want to pay, and they didn't think they should have to, the way the Civil Rights Act worked, an employee had a hundred eighty days to file a lawsuit if they'd
been discriminated against. Lily's team argued that the hundred eighty days started when she learned she was being paid unfairly, when she got that slip of paper. The company argued, no, the act of discrimination began with her first unequal paycheck, and those a hundred and eighty days had long since expired.
Goodyear appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. Other businesses wanted them to win, and a supporting brief the US Chamber of Commerce said it wasn't fair to businesses if that one eighty day period could last until someone like Lily found out. They called it an unwarranted and excessive burden unemployers. The judges ruled five to four in
favor of Goodyear. Lily lost. In a rare move. Justice Ruth Wader Ginsburg read her dissenting opinion allowed in court in our of you does not comprehend or is indifferent to the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination. This was not the intent of the Civil Rights Actinsburg pointed out, But the fact remained that Lily had lost. She never got a dime. Two years later,
Congress passed the Lily led Better Fair Pay Act. That day period during which people can sue now it resets with every unequal paycheck. Since then, countless women have filed suit under the law. A lot of people have found on that a lot of people have gotten money, and I'll lock it Ultimately, equal pay isn't just an economic issue for millions of Americans and their families. It's a question of who we are and whether we're truly living
up to our fundamental ideals. That is what Lily led Better challenged us to do, and today I signed this bill not just in her honor, but in the honor of those who came before. All these laws try to fix the same problem. Men and women have never been valued the same way in the labor market, Not since Francis Spinner hired those secretaries because he could pay them less. Women's work has always been worthless. We also haven't really
gotten over that sex scandal. The idea that women are sirens in a mixed workplace is always in danger of becoming a whorehouse. That sounds ridiculous today, or does it? The Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence, he won't eat lunch alone with a woman that isn't his wife. He says, it's part of a religious practice that asks men to avoid even the possible appearance of impropriety. This
attitude is surprisingly common. Female staffers in Congress say plenty of male representatives have similar policies or practices on college campus, as some male professors avoid closed door meetings with female students. Practices like these have real consequences for women's careers and their earning power. They also suggest that women just by
being women create problems for everyone. Next week on The Paycheck, we're going to hear from people who don't believe in the pay gap at all, and if there is a pay gap, they know who's to blame. Um. Women don't negotiate as much as men do, and that could explain it. I think we're a little bit more reserved when it comes to fighting for what we want. I think we're a little bit more scared. I think overall, women are willing to accept less than men. Thanks for listening to
The Paycheck. If you like the show, please head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to rate, review, and subscribe. This episode of The Paycheck was reported by Claire Setteth and hosted by me Rebecca Greenfield. It was edited by Janet Paskin and deduced by Magnus Henrickson. We also had production help from Liz Smuth, Gillian Goodman, Francesca Levi, and me. Our original music is by Leo Sidron, Carrie vander Riott to the illustrations on our show page, which
you can find at bloomberg dot com slash paycheck. Francesca Levy is Bloomberg's head of podcasts