Link Roundup: Legislation Against Discrimination

Welcome to this week’s installment of Lilith’s Link Roundup. Each week we post Jewish and feminist highlights from around the web. If there’s anything you want to be sure we know about, email us or leave a message in the comments section below.

Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled that employers who pay men and women different salaries must prove that wage gaps are unrelated to gender. Therefore, women will no longer have to bear the “burden of proof” that they were discriminated against on the basis of gender; they will simply have to show that there is a significant wage gap. The ruling was made in response to a lawsuit filed by Orit Goren, a hardware store employee, who was earning 35% less than her male co-worker. The employer attributed the wage gap to the fact that Goren had asked for a lower salary, however the Supreme Court ruled that that was not an adequate justification for the wage gap. [Haaretz]

And Israeli Knesset Members Dalia Itzik and Haim Katz have introduced a new bill that would extend the statute of limitations of suing an employer for gender wage discrimination from two years to seven years. [Haaretz]

Democratic members of the U.S. Senate also took steps to combat wage discrimination by reintroducing the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would close loopholes in the 1963 Equal Pay Act. The Paycheck Fairness Act was previously passed by the House of Representatives in January 2009, but lost by two votes in the in the Senate in November 2010. [The Baltimore Sun]