by Race in the Workplace special correspondent Adina Ba

Author of Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men – And What to Do About It, Evelyn Murphy earned a BA from Duke University in mathematics; a MA in economics from Columbia University; and a PhD in economics from Duke University. She has served as Massachusetts Secretary of Environmental Affairs, Secretary of Economic Affairs, and became the first woman in Massachusetts to hold constitutional office when elected Lt. Governor in 1986. Evelyn Murphy is President of The WAGE Project, Inc., a national organization to end wage discrimination against working women, and Resident Scholar in the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, where she has researched and authored Getting Even. You can find more Race in the Workplace interviews in our archives.

Why you have chosen to dedicate yourself to the project of equality of women in the workplace?

When I started working in the 60’s with a PhD in Economics, women were earning an average of 59 cents on every dollar men were earning. I was the only college graduate in my family, and it became more popular for women to go to college. I assumed pay inequality only had to do with merit. Eyeballing society, I’d assume we’d catch up over time. I worked my entire adult life and in the mid 90’s, we were up to 77 cents on the dollar. When the economy was booming, the wage gap got bigger. Something was wrong with this picture. Graduates of any sex have the same education. Women work as hard, need just as much money. I’ve watched the wage gap professionally and personally. Intellectually, I couldn’t understand it.

Secondly, when I held different positions in public office in the state of Massachusetts, I started to see what governments can and cannot do. It’s been illegal to discriminate for over forty years, but the government has never funded EEOC in ways that it should. No administration either democrat or republican has had any affect on this issue.

I went into the corporate world and learned that CEOs of companies have the power and responsibility to eliminate discrimination in the workplace. Women need to make this known to their CEOs for any possible change to come about. From the decades of my being an economist, I looked at the gender wage gap from the public sector view, the private sector view, and the womens stance. CEOs have a legal responsibility to fix this and any other discriminations in the workplace.

How can the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) be held responsible for making sure that all employees are being paid fairly and equally?

EEOC is held responsible only if President/Congress create a substantial budget to carry out enforcements and responsibilities it has under the law. The EEOC is underfunded, and keeps cutting back on enforcement with less litigation, less mediation services, and less advising of companies. But the reality is that unless the EEOC has threatened litigation against guilty employers, than all the constructive changes don’t happen because employers generally do not believe they’re guilty of discrimination. They don’t believe discrimination in their companies’ exists. Unless they’re forced to analyze the numbers, they’re going to con