DALLAS – Today, April 9, Congressman Marc Veasey said that more needs to be done to close the wage gap that still exists between women and men. According to the National Partnership for Women and Families, Dallas-Fort Worth women are paid 85 cents for every dollar paid to men in the area, amounting to a yearly gap of $7,163 between men and women who work full time.
“Equal pay is not simply a woman’s issue – it’s a family issue,” Congressman Marc Veasey stated. “Families increasingly rely on women’s wages to make ends meet. When women in Dallas-Fort Worth bring home less money each day, it means they have less for the everyday needs of their families – groceries, rent, child care, doctors’ visits. Our mothers, sisters and daughters deserve to be paid fairly for their work.”
Congressman Marc Veasey supports the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would help close the wage gap between men and women and remedy effects of past gender discrimination.
No doubt many women’s pay-equity advocates think employers are greedy and profit-obsessed and would hire only illegal immigrants for their lower labor cost if they could get away with it. Or move their business to a cheap-labor country to save money. Or replace older workers with younger ones for the same reason. So why do these same advocates believe that virtually every employer would NOT hire only women if, as they say, employers DO get away with paying females at a lower rate than males for the same work?
Here is just one of many reasons women average lower pay than men while receiving the same rate of pay:
“In 2011, 22% of male physicians and 44% of female physicians worked less than full time, up from 7% of men and 29% of women from Cejka’s 2005 survey.” ama-assn.org/amednews/2012/03/26/bil10326.htm
Mind you, these are some of the most sophisticated, educated women in the country CHOOSING to earn less than their male counterparts in the exact same profession.
A thousand laws won’t close that gap.
In fact, no law yet has closed the gender wage gap — not the 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, not Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, not affirmative action (which has benefited mostly white women, the group most vocal about the wage gap – tinyurl.com/74cooen), not the 1991 amendments to Title VII, not the 1991 Glass Ceiling Commission created by the Civil Rights Act, not the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, not diversity, not the countless state and local laws and regulations, not the thousands of company mentors for women, not the horde of overseers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and not the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which is another feel-good bill that turned into another do-nothing law (good intentions do not necessarily make things better; sometimes, the path to a worse condition is paved with good intentions)…. Nor will a “paycheck fairness” law work.
That’s because women’s pay-equity advocates, who always insist one more law is needed, continue to overlook the effects of female AND male behavior:
Despite the 40-year-old demand for women’s equal pay, millions of wives still choose to have no pay at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of “The Secrets of Happily Married Women,” stay-at-home wives, including the childless who represent an estimated 10 percent, constitute a growing niche. “In the past few years,” he says in a CNN report at tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier….” at tinyurl.com/qqkaka. If indeed a higher percentage of women is staying at home, perhaps it’s because feminists and the media have told women for years that female workers are paid less than men in the same jobs — so why bother working if they’re going to be penalized and humiliated for being a woman.)
As full-time mothers or homemakers, stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living in luxury? Answer: Because they’re supported by their husband, an “employer” who pays them to stay at home. (Far more wives are supported by a spouse than are husbands.)
The implication of this is probably obvious to most 12-year-olds but seems incomprehensible to or is ignored by feminists and the liberal media: If millions of wives are able to accept NO wages, millions of other wives, whose husbands’ incomes vary, are more often able than husbands to:
-accept low wages
-refuse overtime and promotions
-choose jobs based on interest first, wages second — the reverse of what men tend to do
-take more unpaid days off
-avoid uncomfortable wage-bargaining (tinyurl.com/3a5nlay)
-work fewer hours than their male counterparts, or work less than full-time instead of full-time (as in the above example regarding physicians)
Any one of these job choices lowers women’s median pay relative to men’s. And when a wife makes one of the choices, her husband often must take up the slack, thereby increasing HIS pay.
Women who make these choices are generally able to do so because they are supported — or, if unmarried, anticipate being supported — by a husband who feels pressured to earn more than if he’d chosen never to marry. (Married men earn more than single men, but even many men who shun marriage, unlike their female counterparts, feel their self worth is tied to their net worth.) This is how MEN help create the wage gap: as a group they tend more than women to pass up jobs that interest them for ones that pay well.
Note: To my knowledge, unemployed stay-at-home wives are not factored into women’s average wage. Shouldn’t they be? Since they voluntarily work for zero wages, factoring them in — assigning each of them zero earnings — would perhaps give a more realistic measure of women’s average wage.
More in “Will the Ledbetter Act Help Women?” at malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/will-the-ledbetter-fair-pay-act-help-women/