[Heidi I. Hartmann] said that a bill introduced in Congress last week to raise the U.S. minimum wage, as California did in January with the state minimum wage, would help close the gender pay gap. California's minimum wage is higher than the federal.

[Heather Boushey] found another source of the widening gender gap among young low-wage workers. Here, she found the wages of African American women rose 1% between 1993 and 1999, much less than those of other groups, whose gains ranged from 5% for white women to 15% for African American men.

Last year there were 7,056 wage discrimination complaints made to the EEOC. Pay parity advocates said the number of complaints could be even higher if workers had a right to review confidential wage information and if the Equal Pay Act provided for compensatory and punitive damages and attorney's fees. As it stands, the act allows victims of gender-based pay discrimination to recover only back wages, which amounted to nearly $23 million in cases settled in 2000.