In the past couple weeks, the issue of equal pay has found the spotlight on Capitol Hill. On April 12, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee held a hearing on the issue. The House Education and Labor Committee weighed in with its own hearing on April 24, which was Equal Pay Day—or the day that women are said to have earned the same amount of money as men did as of December 31 of the previous year.

During the House hearing, Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-District of Columbia, asserted that the Equal Pay Act, which was passed in 1963, needed to be updated.

She has signed on to a bill written by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Connecticut, that would allow women to sue for punitive damages in addition to compensatory damages already provided under the Equal Pay Act. It also would prohibit employers from retaliating against employees who disseminate salary information to their colleagues.

Norton, a former chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, argued that the equal pay statute is “creaky” and “has fallen into disuse.” She says that one of the reasons it has lost its bite is because the threat of being liable for back pay is not enough to scare corporate America.

“Employers learned long ago how to build back pay into the cost of doing business,” Norton said.

Now that’s a novel and forthright argument—and one that deserves some rumination. It would seem that businesses want to avoid lawsuits at any cost, and there’s certainly not a lack of wage discrimination cases in the court system.

But maybe after a generation of operating under the Equal Pay Act and other measures like it, business has built back pay into its revenue and expense projections. Would any of our readers like to give me some guidance on this question?