Adding It Up: How many women face discrimination?

Before anyone can file a sex discrimination lawsuit, she or he must first file a charge with the EEOC and/or state fair employment agency (whether or not those agencies are going to take up the case). She who hesitates is lost: That charge must be filed within a short period of time after the discrimination has occurred (the exact number of days varies, state by state, between 180 and 365). The number of women who file complaints provides a very conservative estimate of the extent of sex discrimination in the workforce today.

• About 25,000 women in private employment file charges with the EEOC every year.
• The EEOC logs complaints from another 7,000 women who work for the federal government.
• Sometimes, when the EEOC investigates a complaint, the agency discovers that dozens or even hundreds of other women had their rights violated by the same employer. In 2002, some 16,000 participated in EEOC class action suits. Many EEOC regional attorneys will tell you that more than four cases a year were worthy of class action, but that the agency targets its limited tax dollars for maximum effect.
• Another 17,000 per year are settled at the state level so early that they are never passed along and added into the federal EEOC statistics.

Some researchers suggest that only 5-15 percent of the women who experience discrimination take legal action. If that’s so, our 65,000 represent between 430,000 and 1.3 million women every year. Multiply that over a decade, and you come up with somewhere between 4.3 and 13 million women who believe that their wages are illegally docked by sex discrimination.

In other words, measuring conservatively, somewhere between 10 and 25 percent of America’s 40 million working women endure job discrimination at least once during a decade.

Getting Even