Chris Smith: “Over the course of many years, I have consistently sponsored and promoted women's rights legislation to ensure equal pay…”

“Over the course of many years, I have consistently sponsored and promoted women's rights legislation to ensure equal pay for equal work including most recently, the Paycheck Fairness Act. In the struggle against wage discrimination, I voted in favor of 2009 the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. To help ensure that women are not disadvantaged in their careers because of time taken to attend to their families, I was an early and strong advocate of multiple legislative initiatives to provide family medical leave--including the groundbreaking bill that became law, the Family and Medical Leave Act. And this year, I have cosponsored the FAMILY Act. I voted to ensure that women's rights are protected in higher education by strongly supporting Title IX. I have supported legislation to amend pension and tax policies that negatively impact women and I supported numerous bills to establish certain rights for sexual assault survivors including the Survivors' Bill of Rights which is now law. Since the mid-1990s, I have led the effort to end the barbaric practice of human trafficking, a human rights abuse that is a perverted and unimaginable exploitation of women and girls that thrives on greed, disrespect and secrecy. Twenty years ago, the U.S.…”