Graziado School of Business Faculty Member Champions Equal Pay for Women
With California poised to enact one of the strongest equal pay laws in the country, a faculty member at Pepperdine University’s Graziado School of Business and Management took to the Huffington Post to praise the lead her home state is taking on the issue and call for others to follow suit.
Dr. Bernice Ledbetter, who teaches organizational theory and management at Graziado, blogged about the importance of a bill, SB 358, now making its way through the California State Legislature. Intended to prohibit retaliation against employees who inquire about pay differences at work, the bill also proposes rules around the recovery of wages by employees based on gender discrimination.
“If signed into law, this legislation would strengthen the ability for women to legally challenge pay inequity,” wrote Ledbetter, whose research focused on leadership and values, especially gender differences. She recent won a grant from Pepperdine to launch a new Center for Women in Leadership.
Calling it “mind boggling” that a debate about equal pay is taking place in 2015, Ledbetter underscored just how essential that debate is.
“The statistics are sobering: in 2013, women working full-time in California earned a median of $0.84 per dollar earned by men, African American women earned $0.64 per dollar and Latina women earned $0.44 per dollar,” she wrote. “According to the White House, full-time working women earn 77 percent of what their male counterparts earn. This means that women have to work approximately 60 extra days, or about three months, to earn what men did by the end of the previous year,” she continued.
In addition, more and more women are entering the workforce and more families than ever depend on multiple paychecks to get by, she continued, noting that the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the percentage of married-couple families where both parents work is 60.2 percent.
Bills like SB 358 are vitally important because, if enacted into law, they would empower women to combat pay inequity, Ledbetter stresses.
“I’m confident that we can close the gap on gender wage inequality,” she wrote. “In order to do that though, we need the support of men and women and Republicans and Democrats alike. This is not a gender issue or partisan issue this is a moral, human rights issue.”
Read Ledbetter’s full Huffington Post blog.
About the Author
Maggie Boccella
Maggie Boccella, a lifelong resident of Philadelphia, is a freelance writer, artist and photographer. She has consulted on various film and multimedia projects, and she also serves as a juror for the city's annual LGBTQIA Film Festival.
