Equal Risks: Workplace Discrimination, Toxic Exposure, and the Environmental Politics of Reproduction, 1976–91

Abstract

Abstract This article describes a period when environmental organizations actively worked to achieve equal rights for women in the 1970s and 1980s. Using archival records from the Environmental Defense Fund and from women’s occupational health activists, I argue that a significant, if under-recognized, catalyst for environmentalists’ engagement with feminist politics was the emergence of workplace exclusion policies. Pushed to hire women by newly enforced sex discrimination statutes in the 1970s, industrial employers categorically excluded women from jobs with hazardous toxic substances. Environmentalists joined a coalition of labor and women’s rights advocates that together challenged exclusion policies in the courts and regulatory agencies. The coalition devised a litigation strategy that they hoped would raise environmental standards and end sex discrimination, issues that they saw as intrinsically related. They forwarded an equal protection approach to environmental hazards as part of a broader campaign to expand how regulators assessed toxic risks. They sought gender-neutral protection, and they challenged the gender biases in scientific research priorities and regulatory standards. Their litigation culminated in the US Supreme Court’s decision in United Automobile Workers v. Johnson Controls (1991), which prohibited sex-based exclusion policies. In the realms of women’s employment law and abortion rights, the case was a success. It was not, however, a milestone for environmental protection. It failed to achieve key coalition objectives since it did not raise environmental standards or require companies to remediate toxic workplaces. Ultimately, the ruling preserved equal risks in toxic jobs rather than asserting equal rights to environmental protection.