Publications

Experts respond to a new briefing report for the Council on Contemporary Families that documents how the way you look affects your life prospects.

How do your looks affect your life? Is being attractive or unattractive a source of systematic social inequalities in people’s access to wealth, power, and privilege? Should we add “beauty bias” to racism and sexism as a type of unacceptable discrimination? A new briefing report for the Council on Contemporary Families documents how the way you look affects your life prospects.

Gender inequality within families is reciprocally related to gender inequality in the paid workplace. That is why one of the legacies of the Equal Pay Act, which brought scrutiny and sanctions to bear on gender discrimination in the workplace, has been the growth of egalitarianism within families as well.

Key pieces of legislation passed in the 1960s and 1970s – including the Equal Pay Act, Title VII, and Title IX – have significantly reduced, though not entirely eliminated, direct discrimination in hiring and pay based solely on gender. Unfortunately, the progress of the past 50 years has not spelled the end for gender discrimination in the workplace.

In the late 1970s, after a long period of holding fairly steady, the gap in wages between men and women began improving. In 1979, the median hourly wage for women was 62.7 percent of the median hourly wage for men; by 2012, it was 82.8 percent. However, a big chunk of that improvement – more than a quarter of it — happened because of men’s wage losses, rather than women’s wage gains.