How Can There Still be Controversy Over Equal Pay for Equal Work?
Wired is carrying an excerpt from a book by Marc Benioff and Monica Langley about Benioff’s experience as CEO of Salesforce. While it’s a bit immodest to call the book Trailblazer, I must confess that I read about his experiences with a generous dose of WTF?
So-called “women’s issues” have been one WTF? after another from the time I emerged from rural Oklahoma. I grew up there with employment ad classifications that don’t exist anymore, but it seemed to me that “Help Wanted — Negro” disappeared more quickly than “Help Wanted — Women.”
It wasn’t exactly that I had been sold on the ideas of “men’s work” and “women’s work.” It’s more that they were in the air and the drinking water and to me it was no small thing that they were in the newspapers. So I never questioned the division.
Still, I had learned to be a pretty good touch typist and typing was supposed to be “women’s work.” That skill is the only useful thing I carried away from my brief and futile struggle with high school. I fancied myself a writer and I knew I could not afford to hire a typist even if I were disposed to allow somebody to see my early drafts.
There was only one other guy in my typing class and his cover story was that he signed up for the class to meet girls. It seemed to work pretty well for him in that it kept the razzing to a minimum, so I adopted it. That’s how my favorite high school teachers became Mr. Smith and Mr. Corona. I was, of course, certain that Smith and Corona were both males.
When I was writing my memoir, it occurred to me that my typing skill and willingness to use it avoided some, but not all, of the hilarity attached to my plunge into the deep end of politics. There was quite a distance between the buckle of the Bible Belt and the hotbed of Second Wave Feminism into which I was plunged.
I came from a town of 5,000 to go to school at a university of 50,000. I expect everybody survives at a behemoth university by hanging out with a posse that shares your interest and my posse was the staff of The Rag, Austin’s early contribution to the Underground Press Syndicate. In 1966, The Rag became one of the first half dozen of what would become a movement linking every major college town in the country.
The women who worked on The Rag were skilled and smart and if one of them did not self-identify as a feminist, she did not mention that to me. Everything I knew about feminism, I had gleaned from the stereotypes in the mainstream media. While I was willing to attend the expected bra-burnings, I didn’t really understand why women would be incinerating their underwear.
Actually, they didn’t, as far as I know. I could understand why they would burn high heeled shoes, but I never saw that either. It’s true that some of our sisters in the struggle would not wear bras and there was a tiny caucus making some sort of political statement about wearing skirts when they disdained underwear and heaven help the man who got caught staring.
My second wife was a feminist of some repute but she did not make a lot of political statements with her wardrobe. She did express an opinion to me with which I disagreed when she said it. I have now come around to her prediction that sex would be a much tougher nut to crack than race. You have to realize that when she made that claim, the KKK and like organizations were killing people with some regularity.
Lots of women get killed because they are women and that’s why the Violence Against Women Act was necessary. I have signed a protective order for a woman who was killed before the order was served, but I thought it was decisive to the analysis that women who are subjected to violence by intimate partners are not usually involved in political activity.
Donna was trying to make me understand “You have no right to discipline me” as a political statement. She did not live to see a black president but she predicted correctly the U.S. would elect a black POTUS before it would elect a woman.
She also gave me a very practical piece of political advice that served me well. If she claimed, I was having trouble deciding whether some public speech or act was sexist, I should just
analyze it as if the pertinent difference were race and if it appeared racist with race dropped in then it was probably sexist.
When I say that in those days we spent energy arguing over what was racist and what was sexist, the reaction in this time of post-truth politics is to point at the evils of “PC.” I don’t think PC is evil when understood as I understood it, “Plain Courtesy.”
A question I found useful in these debates was,
What if it was you?
In the case of Indians, it was me, but I was profoundly uncomfortable as the voice of all Indians. At the time, I could not have told you how many tribal governments had relations with the U.S. I knew more than the average person about two tribes, the Creeks because I lived among them and the Cherokees because I was one and did speak to my relatives.
So what was I supposed to do with “American Indian” or “Native American?” I tried to be silent, but, if pressed, I would say that I didn’t know any Indians who called themselves Native Americans.
As an old man, I know that there are 573 federally recognized tribes and I know more than the average person about the cultures of a dozen, give or take. I also know that you can’t go wrong referring to an Indian by his or her tribal identity.
But the big deal was that, uncomfortable as it made me, these hippie-looking leftists cared enough to ask.
PLAIN COURTESY
Plain courtesy told me I had no right to an opinion about women’s underwear. Or about a hot button issue of the time that remains so, abortion. While I’m sure the Cherokee Baptist Church had an opinion (which I can explain in historical terms), most Indian men still recognized a category called “women’s business.” When the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade on privacy grounds, it made perfect sense to me. (As a lawyer now, I find the Roe v. Wade opinion to be a flawed path to the correct result.)
When I first heard that the government could put a woman and her doctor in jail over an abortion, my reaction had been WTF? Still is, but now the line between cultural reasons and legal reasons is a long and winding road.
If the abortion issue did not engage me, why was I out working for her when the lawyer in Roe v. Wade, Sarah Weddington, ran for the Texas Legislature? The same reasons that moved me for the rest of the slate I supported that year.
The Texas Legislature was peopled by individuals who gave “dumb” a bad name and who judged humor by how many people they could offend. The laws they made showed it.
Ms. Weddington was smart, genuinely funny, and I was certain that if I disagreed with her, she would allow me to make my argument face-to-face.
I was not the only guy who emerged from the boonies with a carapace of sexism keeping my political ideas locked down. Having discussed this with men similarly situated, I think there is one issue that cuts right through the habits and the mental laziness. That issue is equal pay for equal work.
Men needed more money according to the Breadwinner Theory, but these debates were happening in the late sixties to mid-seventies, and it was hard not to notice all the single women who were breadwinners for their children. If there ever was a time when most fathers paid child support reliably, I missed it. Even when I was a single dad, I thought the Breadwinner Theory was absurd.
Equal pay for equal work was always the first crack in the sexist structure among guys who were in good faith. Those not in good faith were simply the political opposition to sanity. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 was aimed at equity long overdue. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was best known for the uproar caused by the public accommodations clause, but historians still differ over the inclusion of “sex” among the kinds of discrimination banned by federal law.
The Democratic Party platform had been calling for a civil rights bill since 1948. In most legislative sessions, a civil rights bill would be introduced — only to be filibustered to death by the Dixiecrats, as the nation called the working-class heroes from the former Confederate states who favored only the white working class.
When it became clear that the Republicans were determined to join with the mainstream Democrats to invoke cloture, there was one more Hail Mary in the playbook. In Texas, we call it “chubbing;” the national phrase appears to be “poison pill.” You tack an amendment on the bill you are trying to stop that will be so obnoxious that even the bill’s sponsor would pull it down rather than watch it pass in that condition with his or her name on it.
One narrative claims that are how “sex” got added to the list of outlawed forms of discrimination. However that word got in the bill, it was not too much for Congress to swallow and the bill passed to LBJ’s desk. The big Texan sealed his fate as a traitor to the “white race” when he signed it.
Ten years later, I was a young lawyer working for a civil rights firm in Austin. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made us a lot of money. In the U.S. District Court sitting in Austin, as of the time I left the firm, we had never lost a race case — but we never won a sex case. In my elder years, I remain convinced that we were evaluating race cases and sex cases identically.
Since those times, I’ve repeatedly miscalculated the depth of institutional sexism and there have been, again and again, women’s issues creating the reaction WTF?
After Sarah Weddington was elected, she passed a bill that guaranteed married women could apply for credit in their own name. On hearing that, my response was WTF?
After I got married, I went over to Allstate to acquire the newly required cards that functioned as proof of insurance. Allstate refused to disgorge a card with my wife’s name on it. WTF? I had no problem finding an insurance company that would not insult my wife but, still, WTF?
None of these issues rise to the WTF? level of a denial of equal pay for equal work. When Barack Obama was elected, the first bill he signed into law was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which was about equal pay for equal work. WTF?
Ledbetter had won her lawsuit, but the Supreme Court took her to the cleaners by refusing to compute the statute of limitations from the day she found out she was making less than her male co-workers. WTF?
Surely, I thought, when the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 became law, all the bases were covered. Equal pay for women had been the law since 1963.
Wired published an article about a CEO who favored equal pay for equal work and who was certain that his business practiced it. He had to be talked into an audit back in 2015. He was so certain of the corporate culture that he promised at the front end to spend whatever it took to raise women’s pay to equal that of men doing the same work in the unlikely event the audit showed any disparity.
That bet he made on the practices in his own company cost the company $3 million to adjust the pay of six percent of the workforce. But WTF? dialed off the charts when another audit a year later showed similar results and that another $3 million would be required to equalize pay.
It turned out that Salesforce had been growing like a weed and the method fueling the growth had been acquisitions. Salesforce had bought out two dozen companies for the purpose of acquiring their technology. When the technology was acquired, so where the pay scales.
The issue was dealt with again and procedures were put in place to keep it dealt with. So, I must ask, is Marc Benioff a feminist? I expect that even if he would identify that way, it is not the first self-description that would come to his mind.
The undergraduate women I taught in my second career — most of them — would not self-identify as feminists. The graduate women I taught would. I think my own ideas are influenced by having two daughters for whom I demand equal rights but also from having been married to Donna Mobley.
I have also been influenced by my graduate students, as any honest professor would admit. The undergraduates, if you took issues one at a time, sound like feminists to me even as they reject the label. I would think Rebecca West was writing about them if she had not written in 1913:
I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
When I was teaching, I watched a generation coming along not likely to put up with things my generation took to be normal. Some things that used to be put in the box labeled “women’s issues” no longer fit there. Benioff seemed to rebel against that box when he wrote:
Holding equality as a value is not just a matter of fairness or doing the right thing. Nor is it about PR or “optics” or even my own conscience. It’s a crucial part of building a good business, plain and simple. And there is an endless amount of research to prove it. A McKinsey & Company study, for example, showed that companies with more gender diversity on their executive teams were 21 percent more likely to outperform less diverse teams in terms of profitability. And a global survey of more than 20,000 publicly traded companies by the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that the number of women holding executive positions in corporate management correlated with increased profitability.
I look back at all the nonsense is written about feminism and now the laughs are more at the expense of the writers than at the expense of activist women. At the other end of my life, I can see that the women who changed my attitudes did really well for themselves as well as for the nation.
Personally, I’ve gotten to a place where I reject most political labels because I don’t want to worry about the baggage that might come with them. Still, when I encounter the persistence of policies that disadvantage women or disrespect my wife and daughters and granddaughters, I have the same reaction I’ve had all my life: WTF?
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Previously published on Medium.com.
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