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Susan B. Anthony And The Equal Pay Act

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Imagine being told that you do not need as much pay as a man because your husband is a professor and you do not need the money. This was the truth for Maxine Lampe when she addressed the school district about being paid less. Before her husband was done with graduate school, she brought the issue up with the school where she worked and was told that she could not get the head-of-household pay that men received, even though she was the breadwinner. This is not the only account of this happening. All over the country, women are getting paid less than men and being told that it’s okay. It is not okay.
Gender equality is something that has been a problem through the ages. Susan B. Anthony and many others fought for the right to vote which was granted in 1920. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act into law stating that no employer can discriminate based on gender. The American Association of University Women published a graph on Women’s Median Annual Earnings as a Percentage of Men’s Median Annual Earnings for Full-time, Year-round Workers, 1974-2014 and it shows that in 1974, women were paid 59% of what men were paid. The graph shows the improvements over the years and that in 2014, women were paid 79% of what men were paid. The gap has not budged since 2014. The gender pay gap has improved over the years, but it will not close until new legislation passes.
Over time, the gap has changed for the better. The gap has improved for many reasons but many of

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