Female workers in Iowa earn 78 cents for every dollar male workers receive, according to data from Iowa Workforce Development.

In 2008, the Iowa Commission on the Status of Women requested the agency redo a gender wage equity study in order to determine if the “wage disparity between males and females has changed since the 1999 study.”

The data, which was collected from participants during 2007 and 2008, also analyzed differences in experience, industries and education of the participants. The data included women who were both paid hourly and salaried.

Although the differences between applicants and their qualifications account for a large amount of the differences in pay, 10 percent of the differences are due to discrimination, said Rachel Scott, Iowa Commission on the Status of Women administrator, to the Des Moines Register.

As a result, Iowa legislators are considering extending wage discrimination legislation that would give women more opportunities to file complaints and increase penalties for employers found guilty. Although some believe this measure would cause frivolous lawsuits, repairing the damage of decades of discrimination is worth the hassle.

No, the improvements included in the bill wouldn’t fix all of the problems surrounding the discrepancies in pay. The legislation wouldn’t fix the fact that women choose to enter fields, for cultural and social reasons, that pay marginally lower than fields with large numbers of men. No, the law doesn’t ensure that discrimination based on gender won’t happen, and that those who claim discrimination based on gender are in the right and not merely angry.

But if that 10 percent of differences due to discrimination are resolved, the feeling of equality would be able to spread to more women. This signal could encourage more women — especially those in the 90 percent of pay discrepancies whose pay is lower because they work teaching preschool or nursing — to enter fields inundated with male candidates such as in engineering or medicine. Perhaps fear would be slightly less crippling for women interested in entering those fields. They would be aware that the government was, more than ever, on their side to ensure that equal work deserves equal pay.