Do you know Lilly Ledbetter? Well, I don’t either (at least not personally), but her story is a familiar tale of women and pay discrimination. Girl meets world, girl gets job, girl works at Goodyear Tire for 20 or so years, girl gets anonymous memo at the brink of her retirement indicating that she has been the victim of chronic pay discrimination (making, on average, 30% less than numerous male peers). Girl’s plea gets rejected by the Supreme Court. Yea, that sounds about right. No, but seriously…

Lilly’s supervisors had prohibited her from discussing pay with her coworkers, enabling this vast discrepancy to persist for her entire professional career. When she did find out though, she brought the charges before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Long story short, Lebetter was awarded a bunch of money for back-pay, punitive damages, anguish etc… only to have it revoked because, well, it took her too long to file the law suit. According to Title VII, discrimination charges must be filed 180 after the initiation of the discrimination. That’s right, even though she found out about the discrimination 20 years after it’s initiation. Read more about it here.

Academics, politicians, and laypeople have all hypothesized about women and the infamous pay gap: women’s inability to negotiate pay, awkward gender dynamics in the workplace, women prioritizing motherhood over the office, etc… but this is a very real example of a woman speaking out against sex-based discrimination (and did I mention she is 70!), and the system is quashing her demand for justice. Senate republicans blocked a bill that would have instituted the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. McCain also spoke out against the bill, claiming that it would enable frivolous lawsuits to hurt big business. I’m speechless…

STOP (Students Taking on Poverty) wrapped up its awareness campaigns for the year this week with Food Stamp Awareness Week. Today, the first ever Food Stamp Challenge to take place on a college campus happened here at Stanford.

What is a Food Stamp Challenge? It's the agreement to spend only the amount of money that food stamp recipients receive per week on food - basically, to live off $21 for the week or $3.00 for the day. This movement engages in the Challenge in order to raise awareness of the inadequacy of the average food stamp budget, which has remained the
same since the 1970s.

According to a STOP member Debbie Warshawsky, over 200 people have registered online, pledging to spend no more than $3.00 on food today. STOP provided lunch and dinner to participants in the lobby Old Union today, taking the opportunity to raise awareness of the issue of hunger here in the U.S.

I'm on my way to class, but read this and just had to post the article I read in the LA Times -
The California Supreme Court overturned the ban on gay marriage ruling that the state marriage laws are discriminatory! The right to marry the person you love should be a basic human right.