The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Bhargava talks pay inequity
Greenwich’s Dita Bhargava has always infiltrated spheres where she “doesn’t belong.”
In school, there were no female drummers. So she picked up some sticks and got busy.
Later, at university, she was one of a handful of women to earn a degree in engineering, after spending years in male-dominated classrooms.
When she entered the workforce in the 1990s, Bhargava went into finance. In those days, major banks were still boys’ clubs, and she had to fight to be treated fairly.
“I worked twice as hard as my male colleagues,” she said.
On Wall Street, Bhargava tried to ignore the rampant misogyny in her industry and focus on her aims, she said. But, she found that no matter how much she pushed, some glass ceilings wouldn’t break.
By the end of her finance career in 2015, she was reporting to men who should have been levels beneath her, she said, and her superior was still asking why she didn’t stay home with the kids while her husband provided for their family.
Co-founder of Parity Partnership of Connecticut and a potential gubernatorial candidate in 2018, Bhargava was part of a three-person panel on pay equity in the state Thursday evening at Fairfield County’s Community Foundation in Norwalk. The talk took place after a screening of “Battle of the Sexes,” a 2017 drama that follows tennis legend Billie Jean King as she goes head-to-head with self-proclaimed chauvinist Bobby Riggs in 1973.
For some of the panelists, sexism in the film still resonates today.
Kate Farrar, executive director of the Connecticut Women’s Education and Legal Fund, reminded attendees that women in the state still make 79 cents to a man’s dollar. When she asked the audience to name a few causes, suggestions abounded: Insufficient childcare, a lack of self-worth among women, salary secrecy, maternity leave penalty and imbalance of male and female power, to name a few.
But while all of those factors may contribute, Farrar said there are three primary causes of the pay gap. One is unexpected: Women make occupational choices that tend to pay less than men. Another is historic: Parenting and caregiving responsibilities fall disproportionately on women.
The last is systemic — discrimination and bias — and puts women at a huge disadvantage across the workforce, even after controlling for other reasons, she said.
For those who have tried to combat forces that impede women’s careers, change has not come swiftly or easily, panelists said. Even when Gov. Dannel P. Malloy proposed a simple solution to address pay transparency in 2015, he was met with strong opposition. The two-page bill, which allowed employees to disclose their salaries to colleagues without penalty, inspired a debate in the state House that covered 25 pages, back and front.