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By Fatima Goss Graves, Senior Counsel, National Women's Law Center

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Today is Equal Pay Day. Advocates and policymakers mark this day around the country as a symbol for how far into the year a woman must work to earn, on average, as much as a man earned the previous year. With women making only 78 cents for every dollar paid to men, we have to wait all the way until April for Equal Pay Day.

This year, Equal Pay Day coincides with the close of the first 100 Days of the Obama administration. This is particularly fitting given that the first substantive bill signed by the president was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which reversed the Supreme Court decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. and restores the right of victims of pay discrimination on the basis of sex, race, national origin, age, religion and disability to challenge the discrimination in court. There therefore is no doubt that we have something to celebrate this Equal Pay Day - passing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was a critical step in ensuring that workers can fairly access Title VII and other important antidiscrimination laws that bar pay discrimination.

So given the swift passage of the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, why is the work not done? Well, unfortunately loopholes in the laws against pay discrimination continue to exist, and make existing pay discrimination laws ineffective. In fact, Lilly Ledbetter's story of discrimination illustrates why the work is just beginning.

Ledbetter (right at the signing ceremony of the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act) worked for nearly 20 years at Goodyear, never knowing that she was being paid substantially less than her male coworkers during this same period. In fact, it was not until she received an anonymous note that she understood she was being paid unfairly. Why? Well, one reason is that Goodyear, like many employers, had a policy that its employees could not discuss their wages. In fact, many employees fear (and rightly so) that they will be subject to retaliation if they disclose or seek information about their wages.

Had the Paycheck Fairness Act (which was passed by the House alongside the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and, among other things, would amend the Equal Pay Act to make clear that employers generally cannot retaliate against workers for discussing or disclosing their wages) been in place while Ledbetter worked at Goodyear, she might not have had to wait nearly two decades before she was told that she was not being paid fairly. And the person who sent the anonymous note would have understood that there could be no penalty for disclosing or discussing wages.

This is the sort of commonsense fix that can make our pay discrimination laws more effective and, in turn, take steps to close the wage gap. Who knows, if Congress acts to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act and a few other laws, we might be able to move Equal Pay Day to an earlier point in the year - or to abolish it altogether. This is one holiday I wouldn't miss.
Visit the National Women's Law Center website to see who else is writing about workplace fairness for women on this Equal Pay Day.

Visit the National Women's Law Center Web site to see who else is writing about workplace fairness for women on this Equal Pay Day.