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The state House of Representatives will vote Wednesday on the controversial issue of gender pay equity, but Democratic leaders said the bill is still not finalized and they don't know how many Republicans will vote in favor.

House Speaker Joe Aresimowicz has been supporting a vote on pay equity after a one-week delay amid concerns about the wording of the bill and partisan squabbling between lawmakers.

While lawmakers have been working on six different versions of the bill, they said the final wording was still not ready for release on Wednesday morning.

The biggest stumbling block to the bill is an ongoing dispute over whether employers should be blocked from asking applicants about their salary history. Democrats want that provision, but employers say they need to be able to ask about salary history to see how much previous employers valued the worker. The 10,000-member Connecticut Business and Industry Association has been lobbying against the bill, saying that the state simply needs to enforce the existing law.

Just minutes before the House session began Wednesday, Aresimowicz said it was still unclear whether the bill's "Section D'' on salary history would be included in the final version.

"It's a game-time decision,'' said Aresimowicz, a longtime football coach.

It is already illegal under federal law for men and women to be paid differently for equal work. But lawmakers say the practice still happens, even when illegal.

"It's hard to enforce, and that's the purpose of this bill - to actually strengthen what's already on the books,'' said Rep. Robyn Porter, a liberal Democrat from New Haven. "We find that it actually occurs more with top earners, as opposed to low-wage earners.''

Porter said the inequity often comes more often with workers such as high-paid nurses, rather than minimum wage workers.

When Democrats sought to bring the legislation up last week, state Rep. Matthew Lesser, a Middletown Democrat, said there were two reasons to vote against the bill, and one of them was bigotry. That prompted a sharp response from House Republican Leader Themis Klarides of Derby, who said passionately that Lesser was describing Republicans as bigots. She blasted Democrats on the measure and said they were guilty of name-calling and bullying.

Lesser later said that his comments at a press conference had been directed at employers and were never meant to refer to Republican legislators.

But Klarides took the remarks as an attack on Republicans and an affront to any legislator who opposed the bill.

"You want to talk about gender?'' Klarides asked Capitol reporters. "I am the first woman leader of the House Republican caucus. I have the highest percentage of women of any caucus in this building. I pay my women staffers more than we pay our men staffers. They can't say that in the House Democrat caucus. ... Don't make this that you're anti-women if you don't like a bill that doesn't solve a problem that you say we have."

CBIA has been opposing two different versions of the bill, saying that "enforcing current law is the answer to eliminating any real or perceived discriminatory practices.''

Aresimowicz and other Democrats said repeatedly that last week's postponement of the bill was not related to the Lesser vs. Klarides dustup and instead came because attorneys could not agree on the final wording of the bill.

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Democrats Plan To Vote On Pay Equity Legislation Wednesday - Hartford Courant