American women are one step closer to a raise. And that’s welcome news especially for women in Michigan.

The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday approved legislation that would strengthen the 1963 Equal Pay Act by, among other things, allowing women to sue for compensatory and punitive damages if they feel they’ve been discriminated against and requiring that employers seeking to justify unequal pay bear the burden of proving that any gender disparities are job-related necessary.

 

The Paycheck Fairness Act, which still has to pass the Senate, also prohibits employers from retaliating against employees who share salary information with their co-workers – one key way women often discover they’re getting the shaft. And it creates a new grant program to help strengthen the girls’ and women’s negotiation skills, so we get better at pushing for the pay we deserve.

And we need those skills in Michigan: Michigan women earn only 69.8 cents for every dollar earned by a man, even worse than the national average of 77 cents earned for every man’s dollar. That ranks us as 47th in the nation in regard to pay equity, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Over a woman’s lifetime the current pay disparity could cost her from $400,000 to $2 million in earnings relative to a man performing equivalent work.