Two of the more inane ideas that came out of feminism in the late 1970s and early 1980s were those of pay equity and comparable worth. Unfortunately after lying dormant for years, feminists are trying to bring both ideas back and make them part of social policies.
Maine, for example, is attempting to institute comparable worth by law. The driving principle behind comparable worth is the claim that pay rates should be based upon the difficulty or type of job that a person performs. Typically, feminists compare the wage rates in occupations dominated by women such as nursing and compare that to the wage rates in occupations dominated by men, just as janitorial service. Nursing and janitorial work require similar skills, they argue, and so should be compensated at the same rate.
The problem with this idea is that people are not compensated according to the difficulty of their job, at least not directly. Rather wage rates are related to the supply of qualified workers. Nursing jobs, for example, have typically had an oversupply of qualified workers (largely women) and so wage rates have long been depressed. In the last ten years, however, this has started to change as the ratio of qualified nurses to positions has begun to decline, and wage rates for nurses in many parts of the country are beginning to increased markedly.
Trying to create some sort of master index of jobs and set wage rates equally across similar jobs is an absurd proposition that simply wouldn’t work. As Anita Hattiangadi of the Employment Policy Foundation notes, whom Minnesota tried a comparable worth-style system for state government employees, the main result was that female unemployment increased by almost 5 percent while male unemployment rose by only 1.25 percent. (One of the main effects of a comparable worth system would be to reduce overall opportunity which would disproportionately affect women for a number of reasons).
The pay equity idea claims that women earn lower wages than men due solely to sexism and the state needs to step in to equalize pay. Current if government statistics show that the average woman working full time makes 26 cents less than the average man working full time. Is this evidence of rampant sexism? No.
The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth provides a more likely explanation. It found that childless women aged 27 to 33 earned 98 percent as much as childless men. Although some of the wage gap is due to past sexual discrimination which prevented women in the 1960s and 1970s from access to advancement paths, today the main cause of the wage gap is women leaving the work force temporarily during their 20s to become mothers. As Patricia Hausman of the Independent Women’s Forum writes,
Study after study finds that women with children work fewer hours, accumulate less experience, and take more extended leaves from the workplace — all of which limit their advancement. While sometimes a necessity, these are often choices gladly made by women who consider being with their children more important than maximizing earnings
Hausman also scores points by wondering why feminists aren’t concerned about other pronounced gender gaps:
One might also wonder why the national conversation about equity is so singularly focused on wages. After all, females earn less, but live an average seven years longer than males. Yet, feminists have not declared Equal Life Expectancy Day to demand government intervention designed to end this injustice.
Indeed.
Source:
I am woman, hear me whine. Patricia Hausman, National Review Online, April 3, 2001.
Maine becomes first state requiring pay equity. Cindy Richards, Women’s E News, April 3, 2001.