The Equal Pay Act of 1963: 5 Events That Led to the Legislation

The Equal Pay Act (EPA) is a United States federal law that prohibits gender-based pay discrimination, requiring employers to offer the same wages and benefits regardless of an employee’s gender. President John F. Kennedy signed the EPA in 1963 as an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and the EPA was one of the first US labor laws to target discrimination on the basis of sex or gender. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is responsible for enforcing the EPA.

The EPA specifically bans unequal pay on the basis of sex. However, it permits unequal pay of an employee’s wages in other cases, including cases of a seniority system, a merit system, a system based on quantity or quality of production, or any factor other than sex.

A number of factors contributed to the passing of the Equal Pay Act, or EPA, legislation in the United States, including:

1. 1. Women entering the workforce: In Western culture before the nineteenth century, it was more common for men to work and women to stay home and care for the home and family. Throughout the nineteenth century, more and more women began to enter the workforce, and by the early twentieth century, women made up about one-quarter of the workers in the US. The biggest shift came during World War II when women began working in factories in full force to replace men who had enlisted in the war effort.
2. 2. Widening wage disparities: In the US, women workers have consistently experienced unequal pay, making less per dollar for comparable jobs done by men. In the 1960s, women made about two-thirds of men's wages, or around fifty-seven to sixty-one cents per every dollar. In addition to the wage differential, women often had to contend with additional laws or working conditions, like regulations that restricted the number of hours or times that they could legally work.
3. 3. Passing of the Fair Labor Standards Act: In 1930, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) as part of the New Deal, outlining a number of protections for workers that the US Department of Labor (DOL) would enforce. These protections included a minimum wage, overtime pay, and child labor standards, though they did not address compensation discrimination or include special protections for marginalized workers, such as working women or people of color.
4. 4. Passing of the Women’s Equal Pay Act: In 1945, Congress considered the Women’s Equal Pay Act, a law that would have required that employers pay women the same amount of pay for comparable work or equal skill to a male coworker; however, the law did not pass.
5. 5. Lobbying from women: In the 1960s, several prominent women in political positions worked hard to increase awareness of gender-based wage discrimination and to promote pay equity, including Esther Peterson (head of the DOL’s Women’s Bureau), Eleanor Roosevelt (chair of the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women), Katharine St. George, and Edith Green. It was during this time that women’s advocacy groups circulated the slogan, “Equal pay for equal work.”

In place since 1963, the Equal Pay law has enacted major changes in the US workplace, including:

1. 1. A decrease in the wage gap: The EPA targeted gender-based discrimination in the workplace and successfully decreased the gender wage gap between men’s and women’s salaries. However, the EPA has not been able to close the wage gap entirely, and US politicians have proposed many laws (including the Paycheck Fairness Act) to further shrink employment discrimination based on gender.
   
2. 2. Wider rights for women in the workplace: The EPA paved the way for a suite of women’s rights laws to target sex discrimination, including the Education Amendments of 1972 (which applied the EPA to professional and white-collar job titles), the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 (which increased rights for pregnant workers), and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 (which reduced the wait time on discrimination claims).
3. 3. Additional laws targeting discrimination: In addition to expanding women’s rights, the EPA paved the way for a number of other protections for people in the workplace—most notably Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protected workers on the basis of race, religion, gender, and nationality or national origin.

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