Paycheck Fairness Act - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, I rise in strong support of the Paycheck Fairness Act. I would like to first commend the senior Senator from Maryland for her fearless and tireless leadership on this issue. She has been a protean force when it comes to this issue and many others. I deeply admire and respect her.

This week I held my annual roundtable with the Women's Fund in Providence. We talked about equal rights, equal pay, and economic opportunity and justice with women who are creating jobs and fighting inequality everyday.

Today, as my colleagues have pointed out, we mark Equal Pay Day. Women would have to work until April 8 of this year just to earn what men did as of December 31 of last year. Passing the Paycheck Fairness Act will move us one step closer to being able to commemorate Equal Pay Day on December 31 each year for both men and women, and that is what we should be striving for.

This year we are marking the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and the war on poverty. We have come a long way, but our efforts to form a more perfect, more equal union must continue forward. When President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act into law in 1963, women were earning an average of 59 cents on the dollar compared to men.

No matter how you slice it, median annual earnings, weekly earnings, by level of education or occupation, there is still a gender gap in pay today.

The Women's Fund of Rhode Island issued a report showing that gender discrimination in pay is even more striking for minority women. In Rhode Island African-American women make 61 cents for every dollar that a white male makes. For Latinas the figure is 51 cents. This gender discrimination pay gap affects women at all educational levels.

According to the Council of Economic Advisers, women are more likely to complete college--that is right. Today women are completing college more than men. In 2012, 25- to 34-year-old women were 21 percent more likely than men to be college graduates, but this is not closing the earnings gap. To all those who say it is all about education, and these people have more education, that is wrong. It is not.

Women who earn advanced degrees start off on a relatively even footing--people with a Master's or a Ph.D. But again, over the course of their careers the wage gap widens in favor of men. The National Partnership for Women and Families reports that women with Master's degrees are paid 70 cents for every dollar paid to men with Master's degrees, and women with Master's degrees earn less than men with Bachelor's degrees.

Equal pay for equal work is not only an issue of equity. It has real economic consequences. Families rely on women's income. Data analyzed by the National Partnership for Women and Families show that women are the primary or sole breadwinners in 40 percent of families. If we eliminate gender discrimination in pay in Rhode Island, a working woman would have enough extra money to buy 74 more weeks of food for her family, to make 6 more months of mortgage and utilities payments, or to pay 11 more months of rent. That just doesn't help the woman; it helps the family.

One of the best tools in fighting poverty is to close the pay gap. The Paycheck Fairness Act will help fulfill the promise of the Equal Pay Act by improving the remedies available to women facing gender discrimination. These are commonsense and fair improvements for our mothers, our daughters, our sisters, our fathers, our sons, and our brothers.

We must pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. We believe everyone deserves a fair shot, and that includes equal pay for equal work. I urge my colleagues to come together to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, and with that I will yield the floor.

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