Well, according to Catherine Rampell's New York Times article today, it might well make the U.S. labor market majority-female for the first time ever.

Women are poised to surpass men on the nation's payrolls, taking the majority for the first time in American history.

The reason has less to do with gender equality than with where the ax is falling.The proportion of women who are working has changed very little since the recession started. But a full 82 percent of the job losses have befallen men, who are heavily represented in distressed industries like manufacturing and construction. Women tend to be employed in areas like education and health care, which are less sensitive to economic ups and downs, and in jobs that allow more time for child care and other domestic work.

With more and more men losing their jobs, women are becoming majority- or sole-breadwinners in even two-adult households. The question that remains, though, is who is washing the dishes these days.

While women appear to be sole breadwinners in greater numbers, they are likely to remain responsible for most domestic responsibilities at home.

On average, employed women devote much more time to child care and housework than employed men do, according to recent data from the government's American Time Use Survey analyzed by two economists, Alan B. Krueger and Andreas Mueller.

When women are unemployed and looking for a job, the time they spend daily taking care of children nearly doubles. Unemployed men's child care duties, by contrast, are virtually identical to those of their working counterparts, and they instead spend more time sleeping, watching TV and looking for a job, along with other domestic activities.

I guess more the things change, the more they stay the same!

Of course, there remain questions about the gender equity of the stimulus plan, which is intended to create jobs in industries that are shedding them — which, as Rampell points out, are most male-dominated. Jennifer Barrett at Slate thinks, like Linda Hirshman, that this could be a bad thing, but there aren't easy solutions. Barrett says:

The stimulus plan being considered by the Senate, as it's written now, may make up for some of those losses, gender division aside. But it will do little to close the 20 percent wage gap between men and women or to address the sex segregation in the labor market that accounts for much of it.

And if you thought it was expensive before, just wait until the stimulus plan tries to fix thousands of years of labor market sex segregation. Barrett notes that, while 49 percent of the jobs set to be created by the stimulus plan are expected to go to women despite the current wide disparity in job losses, most of those jobs will be in fields in which women already work (which is sort of the point of the stimulus, to get people back to working as quickly as possible). She says:

Why not require some of the estimated $800-plus billion to go toward creating more high-paying jobs in traditionally female fields rather than just any old jobs? Or specify that employers in sectors dominated by either women or men who get federal contracts make demonstrable efforts to fill 10 percent or 20 percent of the jobs with the opposite sex? Toward that end, the bill could direct more funds toward retraining women for traditionally male-dominated sectors and vice versa.

Not that re-training programs put people to work quickly, or Barrett's example of forcing women who supposedly previous worked in health care or nail salons to take construction jobs are actually desired outcomes. But it might reduce the wage gap! So it must be good, apparently.

It does make me wonder, however, if this isn't accepting a basic premise about the wage gap that men apparently already believe:

In a new Rasmussen poll, 78 percent of American women said that "men and women do not receive equal pay for equal work in the United States." Only 53 percent of men agreed. In the same poll, 49 percent of women attributed the unequal pay to discrimination while only 20 percent of men believe discrimination is the problem.

First, that it doesn't really exist — that it's about the choices women make, on average, and there's certainly some of that — and that it's not due to discrimination. I can't speak for all women, but I know that, in at least two jobs in which I replaced men in the same capacity, I made on average about 20% less than my predecessors after a similar period of time in the position while significantly expanding the scope and responsibility of the position. And I left both jobs because of it. But, technically, now I make less doing something I enjoy more. So I've been on both ends of that spectrum, and while I may have one of the most female-dominated jobs around (know many male bloggers who write for women's websites?), I can certainly tell you that I wouldn't trade it for a construction job with better pay and benefits. There are some wage gaps I don't ever care about making up.

Slowdown In Male Earnings Leads To Smaller Gender Wage Gap [Economic Policy Institute]
As Layoffs Surge, Women May Pass Men in Job Force [New York Times]
More Stimulating [Slate]
78 Percent Of Women Say Men And Women Do Not Receive Equal Pay For Equal Work [ThinkProgress]

Earlier: No, Barack Obama's Economic Plan Is Not Discriminating Against Women

Couric is asked, as she is seemingly always asked, about sexism. She says:

We’re still in a place in our society where sexism is more palatable than racism. It’s not as repugnant to people. There is still a mentality that you can make jokes about how someone’s hot or a babe, and about gender roles, in a way that is completely taboo vis-à-vis race.

This is what many of you said during the primaries, but I think there is kind of a huge difference between remarking on my attractiveness and hanging a noose on someone's doorway. As in, one may or may not be sexist, but the other would scare the fuck out of me and I don't even come from a cultural history where my ancestors might have been hanged by angry mobs because of their skin color. Still, it's a fair point and I like that it's being said that sexism is too acceptable, but we sort of all really need to stop with the -ism oneupsmanship.

She's then asked about the sexism she herself has faced, and answers:

It might be because of my background—that I did a morning show and that people didn’t necessarily think I was a serious person. You know, I am sort of outgoing and friendly, and I think some people think that is incongruous with being serious and intelligent. So I think there may be all sorts of reasons, and that a lot of it is conditioned and behavioral.

I think this is totally true. If you're short, you're taken less seriously. If you're not a prick to everyone, it's because you're not smart enough to be. If your voice isn't deep enough, you don't have the needed gravitas for the role. And, in every one of these circumstances, women are either biologically designed to be shorter and have higher voices and, generally speaking, strongly socially conditioned to be nice as a social lubricant. That doesn't have anything to do with our intellectual abilities.

But the best part, for me, is when she's asked if she's a feminist.

Oh yeah. I am. I am. I feel very strongly that women should have equal opportunity. I believe strongly in civil rights. I don’t want to get into too much else.

That "too much else" is, of course, the issues that feminists generally champion, from reproductive rights to specific policy changes to achieve equality (like, say, the Ledbetter pay equity legislation that Obama promised), so it's disappointing that Couric isn't willing to take a risk and state her personal beliefs. But in a day any age when too many people are scared to even call themselves feminists, having Katie Couric say that she is one is a pretty good step in the right direction.

"I'm Not An Idiot, You Know?" [Portfolio]

Related: Reversing Discrimination [New York Times]
Will Obama Legislate Away the Lilly Ledbetter Decision? [Wall Street Journal]

For one, this story started with that fabled feminist publication the Cybecast News Service in June, when they used publicly available data from Legistorm to calculate the average salary among Obama's 70 staff members. It was then expanded upon by that great champion of women's rights, Deroy Murdock at the National Review. He pulled together all the staff (Murdock leaves off McCain's paid male interns and keeps in all staff who didn't work a full six months), divided them by gender and averaged their salaries. He came up with the fact that Obama's female staff — regardless of position — makes 83 cents to the dollar of every male staffer based on six-month salary statistics, but disregarded staff that didn't work a full 6 months — like, say, if they went and campaigned.

Of course, if you compare like positions to like positions, when available, from before their staffs started leaving to work on the campaigns, the figures look a little different. Obama's 2 female staff assistants earned an average of $16,800 from April-October 2007, whereas the 3 male staff assistants earned an average of $25,000 (skewed by one outlier) — and McCain's 8 female staff assistants earned an average of $22,000 to his the average of $18,500 of his 5 male staffers. But Obama's one female legislative assistant (a higher position) earned the same as 2 of her male colleagues and more than the third, while McCain's lone female L.A. earned less than all three of her colleagues— and the same went for McCain's lone female legislative correspondent with her male colleagues.

Does Obama acknowledge that his senior Senate staff is heavy on the men? Yes. In the time period before the primaries started, 3 of Obama's top 10 staffers were women, and none broke the top 5 in terms of pay. He points out — and rightly so — that there are many, many women among his senior campaign staff and top earners there (as there is, to a degree, in McCain's campaign). Six of McCain's top earners in his personal office were women. Of course, one major difference is that McCain's staff is split between the Armed Services Committee minority staff and his personal office, something none of the conservative publications took into account (and something Legistorm doesn't easily show).

Another problem is that we're talking about pay equity within a group of about 70 people (less, if you don't count those who didn't work the full term) with varying job descriptions. No one in the feminist movement is asking that a staff assistant doing clerical work be paid the same at the Chief of Staff. What we're suggesting — and what's in the Ledbetter Act — is that when women and men are performing the same jobs with equal skill and an equal level of experience that they be paid the same. So, it's great that McCain's Senate office pays highly qualified women salaries commensurate with their experience and it's great when Obama does the same (and would be better, given how female dominated the Hill can be, if he could find more women to do that with). But do we have to be willing to accept that all employers will be like John McCain?

Clinton Backers By Her Side, Palin Makes Pitch To Women Voters [CNN]

Related: Obama's for Equal Pay, Yet Pays Female Staffers Less Than Males [CNS News]
How Team Obama Pays Women [National Review]
Staff Salary Data [Legistorm]

It's not that education is a bad place to start — studies all show that the average college-educated person of whatever race and gender makes more than the high-school graduate of the same race and gender. No one is suggesting otherwise. But the case can and should be made — National Black MBA Association meetings aside — that trying to fix the problems that are causing the wage gap can't stop there. Studies show that lip service and diversity-recruitment initiatives aside, race and racial stereotypes still feed into hiring decisions — to the detriment of women of color and to, frankly, companies themselves, many of which could probably use fewer yes-men and more people with a diversity of thought and experience from whom to draw ideas.

Women of color, naturally, face a more than a double whammy as studies show that they don't do as well as either white women or men of color in getting jobs or getting equal pay. This comes even as 44 percent of black households have a woman and the main breadwinner. Black women's median pay only increased by 22 percent between 1975 and 2000, while white women saw an increase of 32 percent. Race and gender seemingly play off each other to a point where women of color aren't merely as disadvantaged as women or as men of color, they're more disadvantaged than either grouping regardless of education achievement, which is a hard pill to swallow in a country that promises equality of opportunity.

So, what to do? Few of the authors of these pieces offer any concrete answers given that the reasons the wage gap persists are so varied. But maybe, as Bill Clinton said on The View this morning, the first step really is to acknowledge not how far we've come but how far we have left to go. As these studies indicate, that's quite a way.

Women of Color [The American Prospect]
Understanding the Black-White Earnings Gap [The American Prospect]
Black Women: The Unfinished Agenda [The American Prospect]
McCain Dismisses Equal Pay Legislation, Says Women Need More 'Training And Education.' [Think Progress]
Less Notorious BIG, More PhDs [The Guardian]

The CMI study reports that female executives, on average, earn about 30 percent less than their male counterparts and that, at the rate at which they are achieving pay equity, it'll be a short 187 years until they catch up. Scottish women, and women in the IT industry in the U.K. also have it pretty bad, though men and women at the junior executive level in the energy industry might attain equity by 2010, after which they'll all be senior execs and the women will start earning 30 percent less.

In case you're wondering, this reflects a trend in the U.S. as well, in which statistics show that women with Masters degrees actually face a slightly steeper wage disparity on the average than women with only a high school education — and that's before you account for occupational differences at both levels. Occupational surveys show that women nurses and teachers earn 10 percent less than their male counterparts despite comprising the vast majority of the work force, and professional women face a steeper wage gap with their male counterparts than women in sales and office occupations faced. A new survey shows that women at the top of the legal profession (lawyers, magistrates, and judges) make almost half what men in similar positions make — even as female paralegals make 93 percent of what their male colleagues do. Contrary to everything women have been taught about the value of higher education, while you're likely to make more money than you would otherwise, you are far less likely to make a comparable amount to that of a man.

In another sad statistic, historically speaking, women's pay has been catching up to men's in he U.S. at a rate of about half a percent a year. That means, without radical changes, we might only have to wait 44 years to get paid equally for the work that we do instead of 147 — unless you're a doctor or a lawyer, in which case it's more like a century. But, hey, I'll bet that's a century's worth of really important education and training to catch up with men's skills, right John McCain? Right?

McCain Dismisses Equal Pay Legislation, Says Women Need More 'Training And Education.' [Think Progress]
Equal Pay For Women Is 'Several Generations Away' [The Guardian]
The Wage Gap by Education: 2001 [National Committee on Pay Equity]
Professional Women: Vital Statistics [AFL-CIO]
Women Getting Screwed When It Comes To Pay [Above The Law]
The Wage Gap Over Time:
In Real Dollars, Women See a Continuing Gap [National Committee on Pay Equity]

But, in that absence of a record — and as the Vice President on a ticket headed by John McCain — his stances are now basically her stances, or at least the policies she'll be called upon to defend. And, like her position on abortion, his stances on a range of issues important to women are not exactly progressive.

Abortion Rights: On abortion, they're clearly alike (now). McCain used to support an exception in cases of rape, incest or risk to the life of the mother but reversed himself this year. Glamour reports that he didn't support overturning Roe V. Wade in 1999, then he did and that he was kind of a dick when the magazine's editors asked for further clarification. He's definitely all excited about the 2-3 Supreme Court vacancies expected "by the people who decide these things," since that'll give him a chance to appoint justices that will see Roe v. Wade as a "bad decision" the way that he does.

Equal Pay For Equal Work: Moving onto pay equity, something else that Sarah Palin's said nary a word on. McCain's said plenty, including that he's "all for pay equity" but not for the Ledbetter bill because it would lead to, you know, women using the courts to enforce said equity. Of course, he's also said that we could solve pay equity by giving women better job training, which sort of pisses Lilly Ledbetter off. Nonetheless, the official position of a McCain-Palin administration would be "no" to any bill that attempted to resolve the issues in the law that allowed the Supreme Court to fuck over Lilly Ledbetter.

Women At War: McCain's somewhat more progressive on women in combat, telling Glamour:

I think this policy needs to be reevaluated constantly.... We have more and more evidence of greater abilities of women in combat. Also...this conflict is everywhere; we have had a large number of women wounded and killed in Iraq and in Afghanistan. I'm for integrating women as much as possible—with one exception: For example, in Baghdad today, a male combat infantryman puts on 50 pounds of body armor, then another 40 or 50 pounds of military equipment. I want to make sure that women are able to also do that. Now, I'm not saying women are physically weak. Some of the strongest [people] I have ever known in my life are women.... I just want to make sure that they're able to carry out these missions in the most effective fashion.... Women have proven to [everyone's] satisfaction as pilots, as combat medics, in any other role they've been in, that they're perfectly capable, and in some ways not only capable but superior.

Of course, that's a little bit different than what he said back in 1991, but even old dogs can learn new tricks. Is flip-flopping a doggie trick? Anyway, he'd "reevaluate" constantly, sort of like he already has, but I would say it's iffy whether he and Palin would reverse the women in combat decision; I doubt they'd be spearheading any women-in-combat initiatives — let alone any reversal of don't ask, don't tell, despite its disproportionate effects on feamles.

Sex Education: While, as I've previously mentioned, Sarah Palin's record on abstinence-only education is sketchy at best, McCain's positions are more robust. He supports teaching abstinence in schools and is less supportive of birth control education. In fact, he's said that he opposes eliminating the proved-ineffective abstinence-only education programs currently on the books, while leaving wiggle room on giving teenagers some information that there are ways to avoid pregnancy if you ignore the abstinence thing. He did vote against an 2005 family planning bill and, when asked to explain by Glamour first said it was because it have provisions on funding abortion (it didn't) and then clarified that it was because it had provisions relating to Plan B, which doesn't exactly make it better.

In the end, when it comes to women's issues, there may not be a ton of information out there on where Sarah Palin stands, but — like every Vice President before her — she's not going to have any choice but to stand by her man... who hardly stands by many of the women in this country on the issues outlined above. McCain thinks women should nonetheless vote for him because he wants to keep taxes low (not that he's actually correct about that) and make sure that when his plan goes through Congress, the (magical) markets will keep prices low.

Interestingly, McCain's economic adviser, Carly Fiorina thinks women shouldn't be voting just based on abortion, and that issues likes taxes and health insurance are important to women too — issues on which, as I've just noted, McCain is actually worse on. So tell me again how is McCain's candidacy is supposed to be about the issues?

For these reasons and undoubtedly many others, the National Organization for Women Political Action Committee today endorsed Barack Obama and Joe Biden for the Presidency and Vice Presidency — one of the very few times the organization has ever made a general election endorsement. But even NOW's President, Kim Gandy, admitted on NPR that this would be controversial among some of their members despite the significant differences between Obama-Biden and McCain-Palin on the issues supposedly of importance to women. Bethesda, MD psychologist Lynette Long, a lifetime Democrat, probably knows a little about why — she's not voting on the issues, just on the gender that she shares with Sarah Palin. For all Fiorina's (and McCain's, and Palin's) posturing about the elections being about the issues (and about issues other than abortion), the McCain camp wants a lot of women like Long to completely ignore the issues, not choose between them.

Palin's Record on Women's Issues Questions [UPI]
Palin: Unserious About Sex Crimes and Domestic Violence [Shakesville]
Palin On Abortion: I'd Oppose Even If My Own Daughter Was Raped [Huffington Post]
McCain Poised to Flip on GOP Abortion Platform [ABC News]
Is McCain the Nostradamus of the Supreme Court? [CBS News]
McCain Opposes Equal Pay Bill In The Senate [Huffington Post]
John McCain [Glamour]
Women's Combat Roles Likely To Be On Next President's Agenda [LA Times]
McCain: Gay Troops "Intolerable Risk" [Gay.com]
John McCain Campaign to Brody File: Eliminating "Abstinence Only" Programs is Wrong [CBN News]
Health Insurance And the Single Girl [Glamocracy]
Tax Plans And the Single Girl [Glamocracy]
National Organization for Women PAC Endorses Obama-Biden [NOW]
National Organization For Women Endorses Obama [NPR]
In This Election, Putting Gender First [Baltimore Sun]

Within 24 hours, I snapped and replied to some unwitting e-mailer that I found the comments disgusting and that what we really needed to think about was who we were trying to convince — and what we were trying to convince those people of. Well, if the polls that show women flocking to the McCain ticket and the response she's engendering from conservatives is any sign, we've convinced some people of one thing — that many feminists are feminist only to other feminists.

Now, naturally, few of these conservatives are exactly noted feminists themselves, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist (or a Wasilla mayor) to smell an opportunity to marginalize feminists or point out hypocrisies obvious enough to drive a wedge between liberal feminists and the very women that many of us have been trying to convince to vote for Barack Obama. Take Michelle Malkin, for example — hardly the kind of opinionated conservabloggier that I tend to agree with. Last week, she pointed out the opprobrium that rained down upon Sarah Palin's head for working late into her pregnancy, returning to work early and staying in a demanding job while parenting a special-needs child. She also pointed out that plenty of it came from female journalists who themselves have children and extremely demanding careers. Of course, she called them hacks and water-carriers for Obama, but that's Malkin for you — and it doesn't make her point less valid or accessible to the women that Obama needs on his side.

Then there's noted feminist scholar Jonah Goldberg, who manages to decry sexism and feminist hypocrisy even as he compares feminists to "stuck pigs" and says that one might resemble "a childless feminist who looks like a Bulgarian weightlifter in drag." But, he also hits up Gloria Steinem's OpEd, Cintra Wilson's screed and professor/columnist Wendy Doniger's truly offensive statement that Palin's "greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman." Because, really, there's no better way to win over independent women voters than to question their gender because of their political or religious beliefs. Women on the left should not be denying one another's womanhood because of disagreements about abortion and religion anymore than we should be allowing men like Rush Limbaugh to decide who is or is not a feminist. The problem with Goldberg's piece is not his glaringly offensive stereotypes and generalizations about feminists, it's that he can say all kinds of offensive things about mannish, childless women and it's still only barely as shocking as a feminist saying a person cannot be a Republican and a woman at the same time. And the latter bit is the only thing that's going to get a lot of traction in Central Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado and Michigan among the women that have swung every election for the last two decades.

Libertarian Cathy Young (who really could never annoy me as much as Goldberg or Malkin) writes a far more reasoned and compelling piece today in the Wall Street Journal asking why feminists hate Sarah Palin seemingly beyond reason. She hits some of the same shock quotes as Goldberg before her (and me before him, actually) and says that, from her perspective, Palin's "pro-life feminism [and] small-government, individualist feminism" is more attractive than a kind of feminism that requires government intervention to achieve equality. That's the kind of argument that will play well with independent women voter. It also makes its point about the feminist "hatred" of Palin without reverting to stereotypes about looks and doesn't dismiss the notion that choice is a concern for American women. This is far, far more convincing to the people that need to be convinced — you know, those 30-40 percent of voters in the middle — than arguing that Sarah Palin isn't "really" a woman.

Finally, even Elle's political blogger, Lucy Morrow Caldwell, gets in on the action, chastising South Carolina Democratic Party chairwoman Carol Fowler for saying that Palin's "primary qualification seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion" (even as she mucks up Fowler's position in the party). Caldwell also says that no one ever suggested about Obama that "his race was the only reason he'd become a candidate in the first place," a statement that is not entirely true, as Geraldine Ferraro no doubt remembers. But few people are going to take the time to point out these inaccuracies in the politics blog of a fashion magazine, and the issue of feminists "bashing" Palin for gendered reasons allows Caldwell to gloss over the part where she herself would be "more cautious [than Palin] on certain foreign policy fronts" in favor of hitting up the mean, mean feminists.

It's not like I don't understand where the anger is coming from. I have heard often enough from liberal women that they don't understand how women can even be Republican...without, of course, ever actually asking one and listening to the answer. I also understand that, in the absence of comprehensive public record of Palin's stances on issues like pay equity or government-funded childcare, it's easy enough to attribute McCain's (bad) stances on those issues to her, especially since, as his running mate, they in effect are her new stances on those issues — and it's easy to conflate hating her positions with hating her as a person. For many women, she seems to be trying to have it both ways, to trumpet her family values and her careerism in a way that Republicans have often bashed other women for doing.

But, most of all, I think the attacks are coming from a place of insecurity that Palin (and all that comes with her) might soften the McCain campaign enough for him to triumph in November. And so if we rail against her, if we play the game of politics by their supposed rules and castigate her for the things conservatives have castigated liberal women for for decades (see: Hillary Clinton) then maybe they won't vote for her and him. The problem is that each party stands by its own hypocrites (see: Congressmen John Mutha and Jim Moran on the left and Senators David Vitter and Larry Craig on the right), so all we're doing by bashing her is inspiring a defense by her ideological compatriots and re-branding feminism as something that defends only liberal women against bias (and that denies a woman's womanliness if she dares to disagree politically, which is straight out of the Republican play book). That's not my feminism and that's not my idea of equality — and, for a lot of moderate women, it's not theirs either.

Polls Show Big Shift To McCain Among White Women [Reuters]
Is Sarah Palin a Feminist? Friday Feminist Fuck NO. [Feministing]
Sisterhood of the Protected Female Liberal Journalists [Michelle Malkin]
Feminist Army Aims Its Canons at Palin [National Review]
All Beliefs Welcome, Unless They are Forced on Others [Newsweek]
Why Feminists Hate Sarah Palin [Wall Street Journal]
Right Angles [Elle]
S.C. Dem Chair: Palin Primary Qualification Is She Hasn't Had An Abortion [Politico]
Ferraro’s Obama Remarks Become Talk of Campaign [NY Times]

In fact, the most reliable applause line of the night — from Texas Railroad Commission Chairman Michael Williams to Sarah Palin — was any reference to abortion, or, in Republican terms, "respect for life." It is striking, in retrospect, how many times the speakers genuflected in the direction of embryos last night, as though there was any doubt that too many people in the room support reproductive rights.

Carly Fiorina has been stalking Hillary supporters for a while now trying to lure them with the false assertions that McCain is supportive of birth control coverage and not really all that opposed to abortion. In fact, one could even assert that she's the leading proponent in the McCainosphere pushing his "liberal" credentials on these issues, even as she's telling women they "aren't" — meaning, shouldn't be — one issue voters.

On the other hand, where is the women's agenda at the RNC? Pay equity is a Democratic issue, as is increased child care funding, as is universal health coverage. McCain's got increased child tax credits to go along with his insistence that he'll try to stop you from ever having an abortion and that your insurance company shouldn't have cover birth control, but I'd hardly say that's an agenda for women on a par with equal pay or equal rights. If I'm voting on more than "drill, baby, drill," the surge, McCain's torture-iffic past and letting businesses keep their tax breaks to keep prices low, what am I supposed to vote for when it comes to the daily issues in my life? The Dems may get my ear because of the Republican's insistence that abortion is as evil as "Islamic terrorism," but they keep it because they keep talking about things that I believe in. Women aren't one-issue voters, Carly, but John McCain is wrong on more than one issue.

Fiorina: Dems 'Hold Women Hostage' To Abortion Issue [The Hill]
Carly Fiorina's Fuzzy McCain-Speak [LA Times]

She spoke at the DNC not because she's an old political hand, but because she's the poster woman for the unfairness of pay equity. Lilly was paid less than her male colleagues for 19 years while working for Goodyear and only found out near the end of her career from an anonymous tipster how badly she'd been screwed. She sued and won, but the Supreme Court ruled last year that, since she hadn't filed her case within 180 days from when Goodyear started discriminating against her, she wasn't entitled to a dime. Legislation that would reverse that ruling is pending in Congress, but John McCain has said that he doesn't support the bill and the bill is being subjected to a Republican filibuster to keep it from passing.

MEGAN: Is this your first convention? Were you politically active before your case?

LILLY: This is my first convention. Being politically active is a more recent thing. Recently, with my experiences, it's gotten very personal for me. Because it really does make a difference.

MEGAN: Why did those experiences make you politically active?

LILLY: When I found out [that she'd been discriminated against by Goodyear], I thought about just moving on, letting it go, retiring, but I just couldn't. So I went to court, to federal court with the lawsuit and I won $3.8 million which the court immediately reduced to $300,000. Then Goodyear took it all the way to the Supreme Court and they ruled against me 5-4. And so I lost my case at the Supreme Court. And what they said to me was, basically, those 5, they changed the law. So what I'm fighting for now is to change the law back to how it was before so that when people find that they are discriminated against they can do something about it.

MEGAN: What would your advice me to young women to avoid what happened to you, besides being politically active?

LILLY: Be very knowledgable about the companies you work for, their pay scales and their treatment. If it's a young person inside a corporation, it's good to pick up a mentor from within the company or even someone outside the company that's aware of the company's operations.

MEGAN: When John McCain said that he was opposed to the legislation that would change the law back, the bill that's known as the Lilly Ledbetter bill, and he said that we could fix sexism in the workplace and pay equality by giving women better training, how did that make you feel?

LILLY: That proved to me, without a shadow of a doubt, that John McCain was out of touch with reality. Because, I've met a lot of women that have been discriminated against, but one stands out to me. She was a medical doctor in New York and she ran the pediatric wing at the hospital but she was paid less than the two male doctors that worked under her. And when she complained to the hospital, they cut her title and they cut her opportunities to work outside the hospital. Now, John McCain's not right because, in that case, you can't get much more education than being a pediatric doctor. John McCain is out of touch with reality.

Related: TAP Talks with Lilly Ledbetter [The American Prospect]
Lilly Ledbetter [Matthew Yglesias]
McCain Dismisses Equal Pay Legislation, Says Women Need More 'Training And Education.' [Think Progress]
ACLU Disappointed in Senate’s Failure to Consider Fair Pay Legislation [ACLU]

Because — as EMILY's List's Ellen Malcolm notes — Sarah Palin is hardly the latter. She opposes reproductive choice and marriage equity. She's a member of the group "Feminists for Life," which is dedicated to eliminating reproductive choice in this country. She is a big promoter, like McCain, of so-called "consumer-driven" health care, in which the government would eliminate the tax breaks companies get for offering health insurance (and thus your company's financial incentive to pay for yours) — despite the fact that, as Gloria Steinem pointed out, women are far and way the larger users of our health care system. No one yet knows if she supports the Lilly Ledbetter pay equity bill, but she certainly hasn't spoken about it in the last year and, given that the head of her ticket opposes it, it's a fair bet to say she wouldn't fight for it.

But the newspapers are all full of speculation that McCain chose her to try to win over the Clintonistas still upset about Hillary Clinton's loss — and her speech today in which she recognized the contributions of Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton despite not mentioning how politically different they are, makes it clear that it is certainly on the campaign's mind. But while getting one woman to a top position is a great symbolic victory for women, is it worth giving up other things for which we've fought really hard just to get a symbolic victory?

Palin Tough Target For Obama To Hit [Politico]
The Ticket: McCain Palin [Politico]
McCain To Announce Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin As His Vice Presidential Pick (Updated) [Think Progress]
McCain And Palin: Promoting Failed Consumer-Driven Health Care [Think Progress]
Deep Thought [Cogitamus]
McCain Chooses Palin as Running Mate [NY Times]