Honoree Profile: Carin Ann Clauss

Carin Ann Clauss received her LLB from Columbia Law School in 1963, after which she went to Washington DC to begin her legal career at the U.S. Department of Labor as a staff attorney in the litigation division.

In 1965, as special assistant to the deputy solicitor, she participated in developing the department's litigation strategy for enforcement of the Equal Pay Act of 1963. By selecting building-block cases, the department succeeded in establishing four critical interpretations of the act's language and purpose.

The first was that "equal work" did not mean identical work, and that jobs could be compared even if the men performed lesser duties that the women did not. Nor did the jobs have to be interchangeable if they required substantially equal skill, effort and responsibility. Second: The requirement that men and women perform the job in the same establishment did not require that they work in the same physical facility, but that their pay be determined by the same administrative unit. Third was that lower wages for women could not be justified on the ground that women commanded lower wages in the marketplace. Fourth: Compliance could not be achieved simply by raising women's wages to the wage of the lowest-paid male; the women's revised wage had to reflect both their experience and merit.

From 1965 to 1976, Clauss briefed or argued virtually all the Equal Pay cases in the courts of appeals. In addition, as an associate solicitor she was the department's chief negotiator on the intergovernmental team that negotiated the two major AT&T consent decrees, opening up exclusively male or female jobs to both men and women. In 1975 she led negotiations resulting in a second major settlement with AT&T, eliminating wage disparities affecting women managers.

As solicitor of labor from 1977 to 1981, with Eula Bingham, Clauss ensured that OSHA health standards were established at levels protective of women's reproductive health. She also played a vital role in eliminating fetal protection policies that had been used to exclude women from most good industrial jobs.

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