The skinny pink paycheck syndrome
THE NEW YORK TIMES recently profiled San Diego's Fire Engine Company 22, almost certainly the only allfemale firefighting crew in the United States. It was inspiring to read about four competent, hardworking women happily succeeding in a "man's job."
But Company 22 is the pretty side of an ugly phenomenon. Female firefighters are newsworthy only because they are incredibly rare. And they're rare because flagrant sex discrimination still keeps women out of every job that is overwhelmingly male -- truck driver, construction worker, electrician, miner, bond trader, you name it. More than 40 years after passage of the Civil Rights Act and 30 years after major lawsuits tried to crack male-employment monopolies, men still harshly patrol the entrances of too many well-paying jobs. In 2006 -- a generation after "second wave" feminism began with "The Feminine Mystique," whose author, Betty Friedan, died Feb. 4 -- women don't have a fair shot at earning what men do.
How do you prevent more women from becoming firefighters, police officers, etc.? You refuse to hire or promote them. You compel them to take physical tests unrelated to job qualifications, such as requiring women to lift more than the Occupational Safety and Health Administration permits. You refuse to train women, subject them to hazing or hold them to higher performance standards than their male peers.
When they're pregnant, you cut their overtime, refuse to put them on "light duty" if they ask or force them to take time off without pay. You isolate them on the job. You make them change clothes in the same locker room as the guys. You give them numerous lateral transfers to the most tedious jobs and tell them to quit if they don't like it. You and your colleagues retaliate nastily if a woman complains that an officer or supervisor has started grabbing, groping, leaving violently sexual notes, regularly demanding sexual favors and so on.
All these discriminatory devices are drawn from lawsuits that public safety departments lost or settled between 2000 and 2005 in such places as Chicago; Houston; Muskogee, Okla.; Teaneck, N.J.; Douglas County, Iowa; Hamilton County, Ohio; Suffolk County, N.Y.; and the states of Delaware, Massachusetts, New Mexico and Vermont.
