By Gudrun Hutchins
On September 6, 2023, a Commentary with this title was published in VTDigger by Candice White and Sujata Moorti, both members of the Vermont Women’s Fund Council. White is a communications consultant, and Moorti is a faculty member at Middlebury College. The Commentary prompted me to reflect on the many years of my own unequal pay and the involvement of the Bennington Branch in passing the salary history law in 2018.
August 26 was Women’s Equality Day, commemorating the ratification in 1920 of the 19th Amendment, which solidified a woman’s right to vote. Women’s Equality Day was established in 1973 at the behest of U.S. Rep. Bella Abzug of New York, to recognize the ongoing fight for women’s equality. In 1920, Vermont was not one of the states that helped ratify the 19th Amendment. The reason? Vermont’s Legislature was not in session and Governor Percival Clement refused to call a special session for the purpose of considering this question. As a consequence, he was not re-elected as governor. More than a hundred years later, Vermont has the opportunity to become a leader in that long-held dream of attaining workplace equity.
My own introduction to unequal pay for women happened when I was twenty-one years old. In 1959, as a newly minted college graduate with a BS in Physics from Brown University, I was hired by an electronics firm (Sprague Electric Company in North Adams) together with eight men with BS degrees in Chemistry, Physics, and Engineering who had graduated the same year. The men received an annual starting salary of $9,000 per year, while I received $8,000 per year. Furthermore, the men were eligible for a pension, while I was not. While working full-time, I earned an MS degree in Physics. At Sprague Electric, men received an increase in salary after earning an advanced degree. I did not.
I spent the last 10 years of my working life at the GE Corporate Research Center in Schenectady, New York. It was a great job for research, I was paid equitably, and I have since collected a monthly pension for twenty-three years. The CEO of GE at the time wanted to see more women and Black and Brown employees with PhD’s in all research and leadership positions. I remember assuring a young Black woman that she was not going to be let go during a “reduction in staff” period to reduce expenses. I explained that she could be counted twice as a minority: once as a woman with a PhD in Chemistry, and second as a Black or Brown person. Besides she was young and was paid much less than one of the senior white male researchers. After my comments, she started weeping because she had been so afraid of losing her job.
Back to Vermont and AAUW
In 1997, while I was still at GE, I was contacted by the Vermont President of the Business and Professional Women, who wanted my help in establishing Vermont’s first Pay Equity Laws for women. By that time I had calculated that I would have been at least $150,000 richer if I had been paid fairly during the first few years of my professional life.
The first Vermont Pay Equity Laws concentrated on equal pay for equal work by women, and the mandate that employers could not reduce a man’s salary to make male and female salaries equal. Provisions for handicapped workers and for minorities came much later. Some of the early laws were difficult to implement because many employers prohibited their employees from discussing their wages with other employees. Most employers in Vermont and other states required employees to sign a non-disclosure agreement when they were hired; they could be fired for disclosing their pay to another employee.
Bits and pieces of pay equity legislation have been assembled over the years, but a big piece was added in 2018, and our branch was very much part of that effort. Women have traditionally assumed the responsibility for child care and elder care, whether they worked full time or not. If a woman left the workforce entirely to care for young children, she suffered a wage loss and earning-potential plateau while away. The same thing happened if women left the workforce or worked reduced hours while taking care of a seriously ill parent or other relative. In effect, women remained anchored to the lower salary they earned before they left the workforce to assume the traditional family responsibilities of women. That lower salary tended to be the starting point for any future salary negotiation when women returned to full-time employment.
A potential solution was to ensure that a future employer did not know the last salary paid to the applicant for a new job. If it were unlawful to ask the applicant for their previous salary or for the prospective employer to try to find out the previous salary from a past employer, the problem might no longer exist. This approach was the substance of bill H. 294.
In the fall of 2017, Ruth Botzow was the new president of the Bennington Branch and the wife of a Vermont State Representative. Cathy McClure was the outgoing president who had been very active in promoting the AAUW Legal Advocacy Fund, which fought salary discrimination. I still held the position of Administrator of AAUW of Vermont and could request assistance from national AAUW with state legislative issues. Julie Mackaman was Secretary of AAUW of Vermont and we all knew that she could write and present better than the rest of us. During the September 2017 board meeting, we strategized on the best way to get H. 294 out of committee and onto the floor of the Vermont House and the Vermont Senate for a vote.
Julie and I had two conference calls with an AAUW attorney covering state legislation. The same staff member also suggested edits to parts of Julie’s eloquent testimony and made additional recommendations. Meanwhile, Ruth was in Montpelier conferring with the staff of the Vermont Commission on Women and listening to the debate about the bill in the General, Housing, and Military Affairs Committee of the House. After Julie’s testimony in writing and by phone, the committee voted unanimously to bring the legislation to the floor of the House for a vote.
At my request, the Middlebury Branch of AAUW also became involved and invited me to lunch to explain the bill. A week later, the Middlebury Branch submitted written testimony in favor of the bill signed by 23 branch members.
I don’t remember whether any legislators voted against the bill in the Vermont House or Senate. There definitely was an overwhelming majority of “Aye” votes.
Julie and Gudrun traveled to Montpelier and attended the signing ceremony of the bill on May 11, 2018, in Governor Scott’s ceremonial office in the Statehouse. Julie had never visited the Vermont Statehouse before and we took an informal tour of the nearly empty building and had lunch in the cafeteria where other AAUW members and I had talked with legislators many times before.
The photo below was taken by Lilly Talbert of the Vermont Commission on Women and was featured in the Bennington Branch Newsletter of June 2018. The tall woman in the center is Cary Brown, Executive Director of the Vermont Commission on Women. You can see Julie’s smiling face and a bit of Gudrun’s face and glasses in the back row. The bill became part of Vermont Law on July 1, 2018.
