Political Quotes

“I am a former Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, have spent much of my life working on women's issues. Many of them are discrimination issues, many of them are not, and if you would ask the average woman which of the literally hundreds of women's issues are more important, you would have a hard time coming up with a single answer. But I think you would probably find more women saying that pay today is important than any other issue, and that is because women are out here and have to be out here working. Senator Tom Harkin and I simultaneously introduced the Fair Pay Act just before recess because Equal Pay Day, when we would have introduced it, occurred when Congress was out of session. Equal Pay Day is a day that women in the year, usually four months, earn about what men earn during the entire prior year. Thereafter we had a meeting at the White House with the Chief of Staff, John Podesta. At that meeting I asked that the President use Equal Pay Day to do an event to raise the profile of pay issues because they already high with the people of the United States, and to his credit the President and the First Lady had an event attended by several hundred women leaders on April 7 where, interestingly, they did not lecture us but invited in women, four women, to tell their own pay stories.”