Equal Employment Opportunity

The Need for EEO

It was the year 1963, and the nation had been thrown into shock and outrage from images of children being sent to jail and brutally beaten by law enforcement during civil rights protests held in Birmingham, Alabama. President Kennedy moved into action to stop the violence and called for civil rights legislation to be passed by Congress stating that, “Race has no place in American life or law” (Discovery, 2007). Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which dictated that no employer could “fail or refuse to hire…or limit, segregate…employees in any way that would deprive any individual of employment opportunities,” based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin (Noe, Hollenbeck, Gerhart & Wright, 2013), was passed by President Kennedy’s predecessor President Lyndon B. Johnson. This law was a catalyst to many more amendments to protect the rights of individuals for equal employment opportunities, causing employers to base their hiring decisions not on physical characteristics, but rather on valid assessments of an individual’s skills, knowledge and abilities to perform the required job. In the next couple of sections, three major EEO laws will be discussed based on the history of their creation, their current purpose and impact.

Equal Pay Act of 1963

Coinciding with the proposal of the Civil Rights Act by President Kennedy was his passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963. This act addressed the issue of discrimination among compensation between men and women who, “perform jobs that require substantially equal skill, effort and responsibility, and that are performed under similar working conditions within the same establishment” ("Equal pay act," 1969). Before the 1960’s, jobs were posted separately for men and women and some postings for the same position offered less to women than their male counterparts. In 1945, the Women’s Equal Pay Act was drafted and brought to Congress, but was not passed, and every year following until 1963, a similar bill was proposed and rejected. The injustice of the compensation system between the sexes was painfully evident as “women earned 58.9% of the wages men earned” ("A brief history, 2011").

To date, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 has had an unmistakable impact on opening countless doors of job opportunities that were once closed to women, some of those including the United States Military, political offices, and even C-Suite positions in businesses. However, studies show that women still make 80 percent of men’s wages one year out of school and only 69 percent of men’s wages ten years out of school (Regan, 2007). There is still a gap to be bridged.

Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967

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