Shortchanged: Why Women Get Paid Less Than Men

Lilly Ledbetter discovered she was underpaid one spring evening in 1998 at the start of her overnight shift as a manager at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber plant in Gadsden, Ala. She checked her mailbox as usual and found an anonymous note. On it was scribbled her monthly pay along with the pay of three men who started the same year she did and had the same job. The men were earning 15 to 40 percent more. “My heart jerked as if an electric jolt had coursed through my body,” she wrote in her 2012 memoir, Grace and Grit: My Fight for Equal Pay and Fairness at Goodyear and Beyond. Ledbetter had worked at Goodyear for 19 years but was never quite sure she was being paid unfairly. “I was like a wife nursing a nagging suspicion that her husband’s having an affair.”

Pay discrimination is a silent offense. Women know when they’re being harassed and abused, of course, and they can often tell if they’re being discriminated against in hiring and promotion—all they have to do is count the men with lesser skills and credentials doing jobs they still aspire to. But in many workplaces, discussing pay is frowned upon; in some, it’s a dismissible offense. So, like Ledbetter, women often don’t know when they’re getting paid less than men. So they don’t complain. So the problem continues.