An analysis of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act on the gender wage gap

摘要

As recent as 2014, women still earned seventy-nine cents for every dollar a man earned. The resulting 21% wage gap begins within one year of a woman graduating from high school, and will likely continue throughout her career. Previous research has cited education, training, productivity, and occupation as justification for the pay disparities. However, the gap exists despite equivalent education, experience and increased labor market participation. To address the issue, President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2008 to allow women more time to pursue sex discrimination complaints based on unfair wages. The law expanded the timeline for filing a complaint to reset each pay period that discriminatory pay was received. This study evaluates the impact of the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act on women's annual wages to determine if the policy decreased the gender wage gap. The study also analyzes whether the gender wage gap could be justified through occupational crowding by women. To date, no studies have been published analyzing the impact of the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act on converging the gender wage gap. To analyze the impact of the policy and occupational crowding, women's wages were analyzed in 2008 and 2014, before and five years after implementation. A non-experimental multiple regression was conducted on a sample of 199,542 individuals aged twenty-two to seventy throughout the fifty states divided into nine distinct regions. The OLS regression controlled for sex, race, highest level of education, number of children in the home under the age of five, marital status, number of weeks worked during the previous year, and average number of hours worked per week to determine pay disparities between men and women. The regression also controlled for the percentage of women in an occupation based on the theory of women crowding into positions negatively impacts wages. The study concluded that the policy was statistically significant in converging the gender wage gap as women's annual incomes have increased by 15.5%. Occupational crowding did not have an impact on women's wages, as the number of women in an occupation actually increased women's annual wages.