Fifty years after Congress banned sex discrimination in wages, it’s inexcusable that women – including women at the highest levels of the legal profession – are still paid less than men for the same work, the American Bar Association‘s fifth female president told a San Francisco audience Friday.
“Same job, same responsibilities, unequal pay,” Laurel Bellows said in a speech to theCommonwealth Club. “It’s totally outrageous. … You lose talent, you lose perspective, you end up with that bland, all-white-guy community.”
Women make 77 cents for every dollar paid to men, a disparity that has been unchanged for more than a decade, according to the latest report by the National Women‘s Law Center. Analysts disagree on how much of the difference is due to choice of occupation, family responsibilities and other personal factors and how much is due to discrimination.
But Bellows, a Chicago business lawyer, said the main reason for the pay gap is persistent bias, not women’s workplace choices, and the gap is even larger for African Americans and Latinas.
“The myth that women are made differently … we’re still hearing it” as an excuse for unequal pay, she said.
Among the top 200 law firms, Bellows said, female partners, who are entitled to a share of the profits, make 89 percent as much as men who produce the same amount of revenue for their firms.
“The committees that manage the firms are not diverse,” she said. “Put women and people of color on those committees so we can make compensation fair. … Equal pay is good for business.”
She also noted that the 1963 Equal Pay Act, which prohibits pay discrimination based on gender, limits damages to three years of back pay, or six years for a willful violation, and does not allow the punitive damages that are available for other civil rights violations. Those limits would be removed by legislation, called the Paycheck Fairness Act by supporters, which has been bottled up in Congress.
The American Bar Association has nearly 400,000 members. Bellows, who winds up her one-year term as president in August, formerly chaired the ABA’s Commission on Women, a position that was inaugurated in 1987 by Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: begelko@sfchronicle.com
