While recognizing that the drafters of the Equal Pay Act of 1963 (EPA) had, in passing this law, spoken eloquently of the need for gender-based pay equality, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently observed that their legislative goal remains unfulfilled. Specifically, in its April 2018 en banc decision in Rizo v. Yovino, the Ninth Circuit lamented that “[s]alaries speak louder than words … Although the [EPA] has prohibited sex-based wage discrimination for more than fifty years, the financial exploitation of working women embodied by the gender pay gap continues to be an embarrassing reality of our economy.”
In particular, despite the long-standing prohibitions on sex-based wage discrimination codified in both the EPA and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, women in the United States today continue to be paid, on average, only about 80% of what men receive for similar work.
