Summer and it’s humidity has arrived. While sitting back and (hopefully) enjoying some A/C read our top five roundup of news this week!
1. ICYMI: Mind the Gap: How One Employer Tackled Pay Equity
Wall Street Journal- McGill University spent 13 years and $19 million to ensure gender pay equity among its employees. U.S.employers could soon face similarly sticky pay issues.
The program’s goal was to ensure that pay for female-dominated professions was keeping pace with male-dominated ones of equal importance. If administrative assistants were considered as valuable as groundskeepers, the thinking went, the women who jotted down phone messages and kept appointment calendars should be compensated as well as the men working the lawns
2. The White House is no stranger to the pay gap
Washington Post- The White House has not narrowed the gap between the average pay of male and female employees since President Obama’s first year in office, according to a Washington Post analysis of new salary data.
The average male White House employee currently earns about $88,600, while the average female White House employee earns about $78,400, according to White House data released Tuesday. That is a gap of 13 percent. In 2009, male employees made an average of about $82,000, compared to an average of $72,700 earned by female employees — also a 13 percent wage gap.
3. California Expands Paid Family Leave
National Partnership- A law (SB 770) expands paid family leave in California. Under existing law, workers can take paid leave to care for a sick child, parent, spouse or domestic partner. The new law expands that to include siblings, grandparents, in-laws and grandchildren. Workers can receive 55% of their pay over six weeks of leave under the law.
4. Five Signs the U.S. Is Failing to Protect Women’s Rights in the Workplace
Alternet- The prime minister of Morocco recently compared women to “lanterns” or “chandeliers,” saying that “when women went to work outside, the light went out of their homes.” His remarks, which ran counter to Morocco’s constitutionally guaranteed rights for women, promptlyprovoked both street demonstrations and an “I’m not a chandelier” Twitter hashtag.
But before we celebrate our culture’s moral superiority, perhaps we should stop and consider the fact that the prime minister’s remarks would not have been out of place in many of our own nation’s political and media conversations.
What’s more, our country’s bias against women in the workplace isn’t just cultural. As is true elsewhere, evidence for it can be found in both policy choices and economic data.
What’s a glass ceiling, after all, if not another place to hang a chandelier?
5. Pregnancy Discrimination heads to the Supreme Court
National Partnership- The Supreme Court has agreed to review a pregnancy discrimination claim involving a UPS employee who was denied a light-duty assignment that would have allowed her to continue working during her pregnancy.
Young in her appeal to the Supreme Court argued that PDA requires employers to accommodate pregnant workers’ needs in the same way that they would accommodate workers with comparable “ability or inability to work,” regardless of the origin of a worker’s condition.