I attended the Supreme Court’s oral arguments on Young v. UPS earlier this month and was very excited to talk with Plaintiff Peggy Young’s lawyer, Sharon Gustafson, about the case.  Sharon will be among the speakers at an upcoming panel I am hosting, sponsored by the Women’s Bar Association and Sanford Heisler Kimpel. Kate: For the […]

Women are underrepresented in tech. The numbers of women in technical jobs at major tech companies speak for themselves: Twitter: 10 percent; Yahoo!: 15 percent; Facebook: 15 percent; Google: 17 percent; Microsoft:17 percent; Apple: 20 percent; Pinterest: 21 percent; and eBay: 24 percent. The problem is also apparent in compensation – a recent study found that […]

If there is a bright spot to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s comments concerning women and raises last week, it is that his remarks have (re)opened a robust discussion about the real challenges women face in tackling the wage gap. For those not up to speed, at a conference billed as the largest gathering of women […]

Last week, with the help of Sarah Silverman’s unique brand of irreverent humor, we were introduced to the Equal Payback Project.  The goal of the project is, through a crowdfunding campaign, to raise awareness that more than 50 years since the passing of the Equal Pay Act the average American woman is still making only […]

Female workers at the lowest rung of the economic ladder are getting a boost from a growing campaign to raise wages for fast food workers. The Fast Food Forward campaign—also informally known as the “Fight for $15” movement—is calling for an industry wage of $15 an hour, or double the current federal minimum wage of […]

Just before Labor Day, whitehouse.gov released a Chart of the Week illustrating that, among college graduates four years after graduation, women earn less than men in nearly every field of study.  A salary gap among recent college graduates is disturbing for two reasons. First, it suggests that women are earning less than men right away—even […]

Thanks to an executive order signed by President Obama last week, employees who have suffered discrimination, harassment or sexual assault at work may have an easier time getting their day in court. Signed on July 31, the “Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executive Order” forbids companies who contract with the federal government from requiring their […]

This summer, an estimated 130,000 visitors descended upon an abandoned, soon-to-be-demolished sugar factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to take in the latest exhibit by renowned artist-slash-provocateur Kara Walker. Housed in the historic Domino Sugar Refinery, the exhibit was titled “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby: an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined […]

Did you know that a worker can make wages below the federal poverty line (currently $23,850 for a family of four), work long hours performing mostly manual labor, and still not necessarily qualify for overtime pay?  Strange but true. The federal wage and hour law (the Fair Labor Standards Act, or “FLSA”) celebrated its 75th anniversary […]

Last week, a federal judge in New York ordered that notice of a lawsuit under the federal Equal Pay Act be sent to at least 7,000 female employees at KPMG—one of the nation’s “Big 4” tax, audit and accounting firms.  The lawsuit details how KPMG illegally paid female professionals less than it paid men for […]