Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

– Text of the Equal Rights Amendment

The Equal Rights Amendment was first proposed in Congress in 1972. The purpose of the bill is simple: to fully and official prohibit discrimination based on gender. However, when the bill was sent to the states to be ratified, it failed to receive enough votes to become a law. The ERA has been repeatedly introduced into Congress since its initial run, but it has yet to be voted into law. This contentious piece of legislature is one of the most well-documented legal issues to come from the women’s movement.

I chose to use each state’s relationship to the ERA as a snapshot of its stance on gender equality. I expected there to be a visible pattern of states in favor of the ERA with lower income disparity, but the data does not appear to support this. On the surface, it might appear that this data demonstrates that there is no direct link between legal and social equality, but I would argue otherwise. There are other social issues at play that influence the number of women in the workforce and the positions they hold. Clearly, protection from discrimination under the law is only a small part of the issue.

Map 1 details which way each state voted on the Equal Rights Amendment. Map 2 pinpoints the states that have laws similar to the ERA at a state level. Comparing these maps with the map of the largest and smallest income disparities reveals that a position in favor of legal equality does not denote a state of social equality.

Map 1: Equal Rights Amendment Votes
States which ratified the ERA are indicated in green; states which have not yet ratified the bill are in red.

View Equal Rights Amendment Votes in a larger map

Map 2: State-Level ERAs

View States with State-Level Equal Rights Amendments in a larger map

Table 1 presents the information more simply, identifying each states’ relationship to the ERA and its gendered income gap.

Table 1