There was a brief moment 150 years ago when it looked like women might get equal pay for equal work. But they didn’t—and that set the standard for decades to come. On this episode of the Pay Check, Rebecca Greenfield revisits a Civil War-era sex scandal that set the stage for the pay gap debates we're having right now. She talks to Claire Suddath about how a century of rules and laws saying what women can and can’t do have made it easy for companies to pay women less. 

One big reason the gender pay gap still exists is because of a phenomenon called "occupational sorting"— the idea that some jobs are dominated by women, and those jobs often pay less. That didn't just happen. Claire and Rebecca sort through how history determined the market value for women. Then Claire talks with Lilly Ledbetter, whose fight for gender equality at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. seemed like an open and shut case—until a loophole in the law denied her justice.

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In the first episode of The Pay Check, we go deep on pay discrimination. Host Rebecca Greenfield tells us about an equal pay fight in her own family. We take you inside a gender discrimination case against Goldman Sachs that’s been unfolding for over a decade. And we look at how companies magically make their pay gaps disappear—without actually paying women more.

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It’s a big, expensive, global mystery. Why do women still make less money—a lot less—than men? In the US, the average woman makes 80 cents to every dollar a man makes. Launching May 9, the Pay Check is an in-depth investigation into what that 20 percent difference looks like. In this miniseries we'll show you how the gender pay gap plays out in real life. We'll hear from Lily Ledbetter, Mo’Nique, and a lot of other women who weren’t happy to be paid less. We'll find out what happens when a whole country tries to tackle the pay gap. And we'll talk to some women who are taking things into their own hands.

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