John F. Kennedy Quotes

It's great that Maryland is tied for having the lowest wage gap between our working men and women of any state in the nation, but there's more work to do to eliminate that gap entirely.

While women certainly have made great strides toward pay parity in the past 30 years, there is still a gap in earnings between men and women in equivalent professions.

Because women still earn just 77 cents for every dollar men make. Those pennies add up to real money.

How is it even sustainable in 21st-century America that women earn, on average, 77 cents for every dollar earned by men?

Paying women equally for comparable work done by men would be the biggest economic stimulus that this country could possibly have … $200 billion dollars into the economy every year and would be way more effective than propping up banks on Wall Street because this money would get spent and not put into Swiss bank accounts.

Venus Williams is a multi-millionaire not in spite of the fact that she is a woman, but precisely because she's a woman. She receives much higher pay than an equally skilled man. Isn't that precisely the opposite of what is meant by pay equity?

Today, women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment. Women deserve equal pay for equal work.

You know, for every dollar a man makes a woman makes 63 cents. Now, fifty years ago that was 62 cents. So, with that kind of luck, it’ll be the year 3,888 before we make a buck.

You know, equality is a myth, and for some reason, everyone accepts the fact that women don't make as much money as men do. I don't understand that. Why do we have to take a backseat?

It's amazing to me that, in the 42 years since President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act into law, women today still receive fewer wages than men for the same work.

Why do women get paid less money? It doesn't make any sense.

Fifty-nine cents. For years, I wore a button - '59 cents.' Many of my colleagues wore it also. The purpose was so that people would come up and ask, 'What does '59 cents' mean?' One could then launch into a discussion about how women working full time in the U.S. earn 59 cents for every dollar earned by men.

The first bill that President Obama signed into law was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. I think it says something about his priorities that the first bill he put his name on has my name on it too. As he said that day with me by his side, 'Making our economy work means making sure it works for everyone.'

Listen, it's not just 'Full House.' It's across the board in the entertainment industry: women are not paid what men are paid.

The pay gap is a myth, and the pay gap is something that the White House used in 2012 to get Barack Obama elected. It's something obviously that Terry McAuliffe used to get himself elected, and it plays on this idea that women are somehow discriminated against in the workplace and that they're not paid the same amount as men.

Women can't wait for equal pay. And I won't stop fighting to address this inequality.

The truth is, that what women have to do is not work for less money. They have to walk away.

Equal pay for equal work continues to be seen as applying to equal pay for men and women in the same occupation, while the larger point of continuing relevance in our day is that some occupations have depressed wages because women are the chief employee. The former is a pattern of sex discrimination, the latter of institutionalized sexism.

It concerns me when people frame the conversation about equal pay about the entertainment business. I don't want the wage gap issue to be viewed as this myopic problem, because it's not. It's in 98 percent of all businesses, and it's easy for people to dismiss this conversation when they think it's around white women entertainers. But this is about all women in America.

The reality is that if we do nothing it will take 75 years, or for me to be nearly a hundred before women can expect to be paid the same as men for the same work.

We need to make equal pay and equal opportunity for women and girls a reality so women's rights are human rights once and for all.

When I won the MacArthur, I didn't receive a different amount of money than the men did.

There was no equal pay law when I started working. I was no different to any other woman in any other job at the time.

We sought justice because equal pay for equal work is an American value. That fight took me ten years. It took me all the way to the Supreme Court. And, in a 5-4 decision, they stood on the side of those who shortchanged my pay, my overtime, and my retirement just because I am a woman.

Since President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, the gap between men and women's earnings has narrowed by less than a half-cent per year. At this rate, American women will have to wait until 2062 to bring home the same salary as their male counterparts.