Now It's Time For Women To Get Even

As a result, 8,500 employees received pay equity raises. In 2002, according to Murphy, women who worked for the state earned about 97 cents for every dollar men made.

"Could any employer do this? Of course. The methodology is available so that any CEO can apply this or adapt to his or her job categories," Murphy said. "But they are not going to do it unless women raise the question and say we need to be paid fairly."

And so, Murphy recently launched a grass-roots effort to educate women and to get them talking about their pay, discrimination and negotiation. She is urging women to set up "wage clubs" across the nation to create a sort of localized community where women can comfortably talk about their wages with other women, educate one another and push one another to do something about their situation.

Since December, more than 30 such clubs have popped up around Maine, said Annie Houle, the New England regional representative to the YWCA National Advocacy Board. She met with Murphy in the fall and immediately thought the YWCA would be the perfect place to start a grass-roots effort to get women more involved in closing the wage gap.

"The idea of wage club is to get to the heart of it, to help a woman understand what the law is," she said. The clubs "form support and training to really help women move to that level where they could either confront a boss or work with compatriots to get what they wanted. Or to at least to know what she wants . . . and get the right tools to go for it."

Every time Houle has been at the start of a wage club, it begins the same way. One woman shares a story of finding out that a male counterpart made much more than she did. Another jumps in and says the same thing happened to her. Another explains how that differential could mean new school clothes for her children. It becomes something of a support group for underpaid women everywhere.

Women need all the help they can get: The Bureau of Labor Statistics just reported that in 2005, women made up only 31 percent of workers in the highest earnings category, yet they made up 43.6 percent of all full-time workers.

"Everybody has a story. It's sort of a free-for-all. And it's like, okay, if that's the case, what could we have done differently?" Houle said. "I'm a little older, so some of the things that happened to me, we'd be running to an attorney."

That's not the goal of the wage groups. Instead, women are encouraged to figure out how much they are being underpaid and get support from the group to figure out a way to ask for more, negotiate higher in that next job, or simply understand that they are losing money compared with male counterparts.

On Tuesday, Murphy, who runs the WAGE Project, along with the National Committee on Pay Equity, a coalition of organizations working to eliminate wage discrimination, and the Business and Professional Women/USA, will announce the new grass-roots effort to close the wage gap that includes movements like the wage clubs.

One hopes no one forgets to do something after the party Tuesday.

"I'm old enough to have lived through the sexual revolution," Murphy said. "If we could learn to talk about that, we've got to learn how to talk about money."

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