Human Rights Activists and the Question of Sex Discrimination in Postwar Ontario

This article examines the varied understandings of human rights in Ontario in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The article compares the social origins and implementation of Ontario’s Fair Employment Practices Act – which combatted racist and religious discrimination – with Ontario’s Female Employees Fair Remuneration Act – which mandated equal pay for women who did the same work as men. Although a few feminists called for the Fair Employment Practices Act to prohibit sex discrimination as well, their pleas fell mainly on deaf ears in this period. Men and women who fought against racist injustice were frequently unaware of gender injustice, for they, like so many others, subscribed to the deeply embedded ideology of the family wage. Conversely, some of the most outspoken advocates of women’s rights were unconscious of – or chose to ignore – racism. At the same time, some of the most committed advocates of equal pay for equal work actually reinforced certain conventional assumptions about men’s gender privilege at work and at home. Moreover, while the enforcement of both acts was constrained by the conciliatory framework embedded within them, the government officials who were charged with applying both acts interpreted the equal pay act quite narrowly and were significantly more diligent in tackling racist and religious employment discrimination.

Sex Discrimination, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Equal Pay, and Title IX as Applied to the Women’s National Soccer Team

This article presents the issues of sex discrimination, working conditions, and equal pay raised in the legal dispute between the United States Soccer Federation and the Women's National Soccer Team. The authors study the application of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and the implications of applying Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 to the U.S. Soccer Federation. The authors conclude by offering some observations and suggestions on the practical course of action that the US Women’s Soccer Team may consider in attempting to solve its dispute with the Federation.

Changes in the US Gender Gap in Wages in the 1960s

The 1960s witnessed landmark legislation that aimed to increase women's wages, including the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and the 1966 amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act. Although the gender gap in pay changed little at the mean/median during the decade, our distributional analysis shows that women's wages converged sharply on men's below but diverged above the median. However, the bulk of women's relative pay gains are not explained by changes in observed attributes. Our findings suggest an important role for legislation in narrowing the gender gap in the 1960s.

Women's Approaches to Negotiation: The Role of Negotiation in the Gender Pay Gap

The gender pay gap has a long and well-documented history. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 was passed in an attempt to combat this gap in wages between men and women, but as of 2019 women still on average earn less than 80% of what their male counterparts do. Countless factors contribute to this discrepancy, from gender norms to workplace culture to wage structure and so much more. Though there is a significant literature discussing the gender pay gap, the majority of it focuses on external barriers to equality, including but not limited to institutional inequality, social norms, and workplace discrimination. Fewer scholars have addressed the internalized barriers to equality in the workplace that women face—such as how gendered norms and expectations may affect workplace behaviors such as negotiating compensation packages. My project employs qualitative content coding and individual breakdown of semi-structured, in-depth interviews to investigate if, how, and why women’s approaches to negotiation may contribute to pay inequity in professional positions. My findings confirm a discrepancy in rates of negotiation between male and female respondents. They also suggest that divergences in the circumstances surrounding negotiations as well as in approaches to negotiation exist between men and women, and among workers with various levels of seniority. Finally, my findings in combination with existing literature suggest a link between negotiation and the gender pay gap.

FIFA, Forced Arbitration, and the U.S. Soccer Lawsuits

American soccer has been besieged by lawsuits. In the last two years alone, the United States Soccer Federation (“U.S. Soccer”) has been hit with two antitrust lawsuits, two Equal Pay Act and Title VII gender discrimination lawsuits, and a trademark lawsuit, while two of its professional league members are engaged in their own trademark lawsuit. One threshold question that has received scant attention in the media is whether these disputes should be in federal court at all. Under the Statutes and Regulations of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (“FIFA”), soccer’s global governing organization, all disputes are required to be arbitrated. Taking a dispute to an ordinary court of law is potentially subject to sanction, which could include suspension or even expulsion. Given this forced arbitration rule, this article considers several possible explanations for why there has been no push to arbitrate the disputes in most of the lawsuits: (1) The enforceability of FIFA’s arbitration requirement has been called into question by recent rulings against forced arbitration clauses; (2) FIFA focuses the enforcement of its arbitration requirement on certain types of cases; (3) FIFA does not consider certain types of claims subject to arbitration; and (4) U.S. Soccer’s bylaws do not impose the arbitration requirement in such a way as it would apply to these types of cases. Although none of these entirely resolve the matter in a satisfactory way, in the aggregate they may help to define the emerging limits to arbitration for sports governing bodies in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Why the Equal Pay Act and Laws Which Prohibit Salary Inquiries of Job Applicants Can Not Adequately Address Gender-Based Pay Inequity

Despite passage of the Equal Pay Act (EPA) more than a half-century ago, surveys consistently show that women still earn significantly less than men. One factor to which this has been attributed is the use of current salary as a basis for a new job offer. Such a practice, it has been argued, perpetuates the kinds of salary differentials the EPA attempted to eradicate. As a result, many municipalities have passed laws which prohibit inquiries as to an applicant’s current salary. This article explores the nature of such laws and their limitations and offers alternative strategies to close the pay gap between genders.

The Trico-Folberth equal pay strike, Brentford, 1976

The longest equal pay strike in British labour history took place at the Trico-Folberth windscreen wiper factory in Brentford, west London, during the summer of 1976. This chapter will be the first detailed consideration of this strike from an historical perspective. Having discussed the Equal Pay Act’s failure to achieve a meaningful reduction in the differential between male and female wages in Chapter 1, and considered the key role the Ford sewing-machinists played in the origins of equal pay legislation in Chapter 2, this case study examines how the Equal Pay Act was interpreted and challenged by female workers once it was implemented in 1975. The chapter considers the Trico women’s experiences of work and trade unionism. It considers the women’s subjective motivations for going on strike, and examines the extent to which they associated the dispute with a shift in their expectations of paid work, and political identity.

The Ford Sewing machinists’ strike, 1968, Dagenham

Chapter 2 provides an original account of the Ford Sewing Machinists’ fight for skill recognition in 1968. The strike is widely understood as a crucial turning point that led to the Equal Pay Act in 1970. The strike occupies a key position in the histories of the labour movement and the WLM. The idea that the strike was a decisive victory in women’s fight for equal pay was popularised by 2010 feature film Made in Dagenham, which has been adapted into a West End musical. The subsequent publicity generated by the film has proceeded to weave the place of the dispute firmly within public memory of the strike as a turning point in societal attitudes towards women’s right to equal pay. However the triumphant narrative of the strike as a victory has served to disguise the fact that the women at Ford went on strike because they wanted the skilled nature of their work recognised. This chapter offers a new account of the strike from the perspective of the women involved. It is original because it locates the strike within participants’ life stories; it foregrounds their own understanding of why they engaged in the strike and their judgements of its outcome.