I worked on West Madison Street and right down the street from where I worked was the office of an amazing bunch of people. In 1964, the US had passed the Civil Rights Act which included Title VII, which said among other things that it is right and necessary to pay two people the same amount of money if they do essentially the same job.  The responsibility for enforcing this was given to the  UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF LABOUR  EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY COMMISSION WAGE AND HOUR DIVISION

I walked out the door and went down the street to the EEOC. 

These guys were my heroes. When it looked like no one else in the world cared what happened to me at that job, the two men I talked to at the Wage and Hour Division of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission gave me hope. I had been to see them earlier, when I first found out I was being paid $300 a month less than a man who had done the same job. At that time they had given me some good advice:

Interestingly, if the company had not been so insistent upon my punching a time clock, I might never have found out about the salary difference. I actually ended up filing my complaint, not over the fact that they had told me that I could not do a job that I knew I could do, which is always hard to prove. Not over the fact that they had played favourites with the other person which is always hard to prove. Not over whether I could sign up as a Registered Representative because they can always dream up reasons why you can't represent them that seem justified. I sued them over the fact that, incontrovertibly by the mathematics of the situation, they must have paid a man AT LEAST $300 a month more than me to do the same job I was doing. 

Many people have said that I was brave to file a formal complaint against my employer. I say that I had simply had enough. My personal journal from the time documents my anger and upset. Over and over and over in that document, I read of my frustration at not being able to get myself taken seriously as a committed worker with a future other than clerical work. The company's refusal finally to even allow me to train to move up, was the last straw. I wasn't brave. I was just fed up. You reach a breaking point. When they take away your dreams, you don't have anything more to lose. It couldn't get any worse....

Don't ever say those words. It can always get worse and it usually does. You can always sink further down in the barrel. It is astounding how far down the bottom can be, and when you reach the bottom, often it's a false one and you can fall even lower.

You can't crawl out of a deep barrel yourself; you have to have help. The stress of living through this process was so bad that there were times I'd sit down to dinner and could not eat because the pain in my stomach was so bad. I went for every test known and of course there was nothing physically wrong; it was the stress of living day to day in a situation so unpleasant that you would give just about anything to get out of it but know you have to continue. By then the EEOC had started their investigation and the company knew that I had filed a suit against them. I had a supportive husband and friends, far-away but supportive family, but I needed more. 

The new rules as we re-wrote them the second time I taught this course, include the fact that you must not fight alone. You must find a support group, people who think like you and who will stand with you. The two men I talked to at the EEOC were great. They were supportive, honest, up-front; they pulled no punches; they made no false assurances; they told me what it would be like. They told me that the law says you have to be guaranteed confidentiality, but they explained to me how, given that I was the only person in this particular job, when they came in to investigate, the company was going to know it was me. But they also told me about cases the Commission had won. They told me how important a task it was to challenge these companies, how if it were not for people like me, they would not be able to do the job they thought was so important to do. 

They told me too that not a lot of people win Equal Pay suits because companies pay good money to tough lawyers to fight these battles for them, but that if a company fires you because you have filed a suit, then the odds are about 99 out of 100 that you will get a settlement. This gave me courage.

I also found support from fellow employees. One was a boss' secretary, a woman who had raised four children on her own, working most of her life as a cocktail waitress before she went back to school at night and trained to be a secretary,  a woman for whom the loss of her job would have been an unspeakable hardship, she risked all that to get me the confidential documents I needed to to prove my case about the salaries. 

Carol, a fellow researcher, stayed my friend when many didn't. That may not sound like a lot to you, but imagine working in a place where every day when you go in, you know that they know that you know that they know that you have filed a suit against them with the federal government and most people, even the most well-meaning, just don't even want to think about that, much less be seen talking to someone who did it. Carol stayed my friend and had coffee with me and went to lunch with me and talked to me. (Carol, if you're out there somewhere, I sit here writing this with happy tears in my eyes as I remember you.) 

The secretary of another company boss was the president of the local chapter of the National Organization for Women. She took me to a women's consciousness-raising group where I met Betty Friedan, who had co-founded  NOW, the National Organization for Women, seven years before, and who gave me encouraging words and wrote them in my copy of her book, The Feminine Mystique.

Not everyone was supportive. Gladys, an older woman, was angry with me and showed it. Later, just before I left the company, Gladys came to tell me why she had been so upset with me. She had fought a similar battle when she was about my age (26), and had lost bitterly; she said she simply could not stand to see me go through what she had gone through. While I would have preferred to have her support and to know her story earlier, I could sympathize. 

Meanwhile, the company had merged with another and was in the process of moving everything to New York. Finally the day came when they moved the Bond Office, and they could safely let me go. I was one of the last they let go, partly because they had good reason to be scared that if they did it too soon, I could successfully claim they had fired me because of the Equal Pay suit. 

I'm someone who usually experiences what the Germans call "staircase wit" -- thinking of the witty reply you SHOULD have made as you walk down the stairs from the old-fashioned upstairs-ballroom to leave the party at which you were insulted.

But this time, I thought of it then and there. When the boss called me into his office to tell me that they were going to have to let me go, I said, "Glory Halleujah, Praise the Lord, I have been delivered," turned on my heel and walked out. (The irony is clearer here if you know that I am a Unitarian Universalist and normally come nowhere near any such fundamentalist utterings). 

Not long after that, the EEOC pushed the company to offer me a settlement out of court. They told me that it was largely my detailed diary and documentation that enabled them to get the employer to settle; given the explicit detail with days and times noted and direct words quoted, it was very difficult for them to contradict. They offered only US$1000, which was roughly three months' differential, but the EEOC urged me to accept it, advising me that if I went to court to try to get more it could take years and any extra money would be eaten up in lawyers' fees. Besides, it was as it so often is, the principle that mattered. "Take the money and run," were the words of one of the guys who had been so supportive, and so I did. The cheque came a few weeks later, for US$721 after taxes. I put it in the bank. It started the savings account with which I eventually bought my harp and I never regretted my decision to stop the process there. It had been hard enough going that far. 

When I came back a few days after that to say goodbye to the last two women who were still there, I overheard the boss saying on the telephone to someone in New York, "I wouldn't give the bitch one red cent" and I suspected that I guessed correctly about whom he was speaking. That was the only time back then that I ever felt I had won anything.

For years I questioned what I had won. Sure, with the help of the United States government, I had forced a large American stockbrokerage to admit they had done wrong, and to pay me some money, but would it make a difference in how they treated women in the future? Or would they just be more careful, slyer, more deceitful next time? And at what a cost to me? The experience was so grueling, demeaning, frightening, gut-wrenching, that for three years I could not talk about it without tears running down my face, and for ten years I never mentioned it professionally. Legal action should always be the last resort; it is not an easy thing to do. 

Only when Professor Meg Luxton of York's Women's Studies programme asked me in the late 1980's to speak at a film she was showing about women in business, did I for the very first time tell my  story in a professional setting. That experience with Meg was part of what inspired me to start this course. And it has been in teaching this material that I have come finally to accept that it was worth it. The new rules that came out of the second time teaching the course in Women and Business, we called 

The Rules of the 1990's

1. Realize that, in most jobs, you are going to get paid less than a man, unless you are prepared to fight for your rights. Learn about Equal Pay for Equal Work, and about Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value

2. Don't fight alone. Find other people who think like you do and who share similar experiences. Work together to change things

3. Pay your dues and get your credentials. Get an education. Work your way up through the ranks. Watch out for that glass ceiling!

4. Do something you are happy doing and that fits your value system. What are our values anyway? In the 1970's, women adjusted to the corporate world by cloning themselves into men, and perpetuating the status quo; now, perhaps, there is a chance to change the corporate mentality and make life more livable for everyone

5. Be flexible. Be willing to change gears, to look at something from a different angle, to try a new way to accomplish something

6. Believe in yourself

7. Practice networking and include men in your network

8. Strive for small victories, and share them

9. Offer suggestions and share ideas. Sometimes people don't change because they don't realize how it could be done. Suggest some ideas for change

10. Be clear on your career objectives. Know what you want and have some idea of how you will achieve it, and who could help you achieve it

11. Be supportive of others who are working to make changes. Just as you need someone to bolster your spirits, someone else may need you

12. Be proud to call yourself a feminist and be willing to explain what it really means

The Aftermath

I was back in school by now, working full time and doing my MBA part time. Although there was no such thing then as a "Women's Studies" degree, I made my own by reading everything I could find on issues of gender in business and doing all my papers on women's issues. At that time the MBA was an almost totally male-dominated degree programme. In 16 courses, I had one female teacher. In a class of 60 students, there might be one other woman. The textbooks all used "he" exclusively, as in "if the manager feels he must respond, then he should," and the only time women were mentioned at all was in phrases such as, "The weak sister in our distribution chain is Joe's Warehouse out in Denver."  

In Father McMahon's MBA class on Social Responsibility, we were required to do a project at work that involved getting the firm we worked for to think with more conscience. Almost all of us worked full time then in the evening programme, but I had just left the job at the stockbrokerage and was unemployed. Fr. McMahon suggested I write up my case for my class project, and I did. I eventually completed my MBA. 

Part of this story is about CREDENTIALS. Credentials are crucial. You can't do much from outside and I knew from growing up as the daughter of a labour union organizer that you can't get in without a union card.

While for the labourer the union card is literally the membership card and its attendant dues and respect for what the union stands for, for upper management, the "union card" metaphorically is the MBA. Without one, it's difficult for anyone to get there, male or female. It represents, if not literally membership in a union, at least membership in a select group of men and women educated above the bachelor's level specifically for careers in management. The dues are the 2 years full time, 5 or more part-time, to get the degree. Respect for what the union stands for is represented by the beliefs inculcated in you by the years in management classes - if you're not careful!

For the university professor, the "union card" is the Ph.D. And in the spring of 1997, we learned that it is also literally a union card. Your York professors are a unionized workforce, and I am proud of that.

Rule # 4 advises to do something you are happy doing and that fits your value system. I finally quit the business world, went to Southwest Texas to take a job teaching fifth grade in a classroom of 23 students, 3 of whom spoke only Spanish; I was close to being bilingual when I moved to Canada. 

I finished my MBA in the summer of 1977, but swore I'd starve in the streets before I'd work for the corporate world again. I thought I was unusual, thought it was just me, thought it was my fault. I'd not been happy anywhere in business. I'd worked for a number of companies and I was never happy. Always the structure of the systems, the values that lay behind the structure, and the absurdity of the way the work was organized appalled me. When I moved to Canada, my mother's homeland, I found work at Atkinson College of York University and have remained there ever since.

But I thought I was a failure. For over a decade, I thought I was strange among my fellow M.B.A.'s, an oddball, a misfit, a woman not really cut out for the competitive world of men. Then, in February of 1988, The Globe and Mail did an article on the top women graduates from University of Western Ontario's M.B.A. programme ten years ago, and where they are today. Their year, 1978, was the year I also graduated with my M.B.A.

They had had similar experiences to mine - oh not exactly, none with equal pay suits, but certainly with equally abusive companies and colleagues and lifestyles. And I sat and cried as I read their stories. I still can't tell their stories in the classroom without tears coming to my eyes.  

One woman who worked in banking told of three male colleagues who one day when she was home sick, starting literally to move her office to a remote corner of the department. Only the outrage of the secretaries, who respected the woman as a boss, had stopped them.

Another told of realizing that her daughters were 16 and 13 and she barely knew them. She had simply never had time to be with them while they were growing up.

Another told of discovering that her daughter had been abused by the last sitter she was with, but hadn't told her mom because she knew how hard it was to find sitters.

These women had asked themselves, as I had asked myself, as I will ask you to think about -- Is this what women fought so hard for? To work for inhumane, overly-competitive corporations with no sense of human dignity? To be able to be just like the men that women always complained about? To work 80 hour weeks, never know our children, miss dinner with the family, and fall into bed exhausted too tired to speak to our spouse, much less nurture a relationship? I came to ask, what are my values? What are the values of the society in which I live? Did I really want to be a corporate bond trader? And at what cost?

What are our values? Are women going to adjust to the corporate world by cloning themselves into men and perpetuating the status quo, or are we perhaps going to try to change the corporate mentality and make life more livable for everyone. What exactly is failure? If I had been "successful" at the stockbrokerage, I might well be a corporate bond trader today. I would never have known my husband and son. I would probably never have moved to Canada and taught at York. I would not have had the pleasure of providing the School of Administrative Studies with at least one tenured feminist scholar, and I would not be teaching this course. I would have missed out on a whole lot of wonderful things if I had been "successful" in Chicago. Perhaps my "failure" there was the best thing that ever happened to me.  

Here is someone who taught me a whole lot about failure. Her name is Amber and shewas a failure at the racetracks. She lost every race she ran at the Wisconsin racetracks where she languished in a miserable cage until saved by a greyhound rescue effort. She is now my beloved companion who gets me out of the house and takes my mind off the stress of my job. I credit her literally with saving my life during the darkest depths of depression when she first came into my life. She is no failure. She just started her life in the wrong job.

We need to take a good hard look at what we value, both men and women, and how we define failure. The women's movement is not only about women. It is about women and men and children and business and how we balance work life and home life, and about our whole society and what we value in it. When we fail at one thing, perhaps it is just a gateway to something better.  

The lesson of this story that I want you to take away with you is the very real cost of paying a woman less than a man to do the same job. Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value is a difficult concept, admirable in principle but difficult to operationalize. But Equal Pay for Equal Work ought never even to be a question. If two people are doing the same job, they should be paid the same amount. The damage done by not honouring this principle is not only in money. It cost me money and it cost me tremendously in damage to my health. It cost the company money, but it could have cost them a lot more, not only in a potentially larger settlement, but in the damage done to their reputation as word of this kind of practice gets around. In this case they did not have to worry about that; I took no small pleasure in reading a few years after this that the company had gone bankrupt.