Family Responsibilities Discrimination

My colleague Heather Boushey was testifying today before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on the subject of “family responsibilities discrimination” in employment, a phenomenon in which workers who have responsibilities for caring for family members (typically children, but also potentially a disabled or elderly relative) are subject to discrimination in pay and promotion opportunities. Obviously, discrimination of this sort doesn’t per se take the form of discriminating against women, but in practice such responsibilities fall disproportionately on women so the impact of discrimination falls on them. And this is a major contributor to the gender pay gap:

The lower pay of women is due to a number of factors, but key among them is that many women continue to be paid less for doing the same job as the man sitting next to them. By the most basic measure, women continue to earn 78 cents on the male dollar and much of this gap cannot be explained by the kinds of jobs men and women hold or their skill levels. For example, Blau and Kahn found that 41.1 percent of the gender pay gap remains unexplained. This means that if women worked in the same jobs as men and had the same educational and experience levels, the gender pay ratio would rise from 80 to 91 percent of men’s.

Part of the issue here is that there’s no law specifically aimed at curbing this problem. However, there’s a strong case to be made that action could be taken under existing law that bans discrimination on the basis of sex and the Americans With Disabilities Act. The point would be that FRD in part represents an effort to structure payscales around gender stereotyped ideas about the division of labor within the family—a man with a family needs more money because he’s “supporting a family” whereas a woman with a family should get paid less because her primary responsibilities are elsewhere.

But there’s also room for substantial new legislative activity, including a more robust version of Family and Medical Leave (the current law only covers about half of the workforce and and doesn’t provide for any money) or for the Paycheck Fairness Act currently before the Senate.