Posted on 04/15/2014 7:54:02 AM PDT by Kaslin
President Barack Obama and his feminist friends have been trotting out their tiresome slogan that women are paid only 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. Every reputable scholar who has commented has proved that this is a notorious falsehood that anyone should be embarrassed to use.
U.S. law calls for equal pay for equal work, but the feminist slogan is not based on equal work. Women work fewer hours per day, per week, per year. They spend fewer years as full-time workers outside the home, avoid jobs that require overtime, and choose jobs with flexibility to take time off for personal reasons. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, men are twice as likely as women to work more than 40 hours a week.
Women place a much higher value on pleasant working conditions: a clean, comfortable, air-conditioned office with congenial co-workers. Men, on the other hand, are more willing to endure unpleasant working conditions to earn higher pay, doing dirty, dangerous outside work. In 2012, men suffered 92 percent of work-related deaths.
If a man is supporting his family, at the peak of his career, he often works longer hours to maximize his earnings. By contrast, a successful woman who reaches a high rank in her career is more likely to reduce her working hours.
All these reasons for women voluntarily choosing lower pay are now beyond dispute among those who have looked at the facts. But even those explanations for the alleged pay "gap" are still only part of the story.
Perhaps an even more important reason for women's lower pay is the choices women make in their personal lives, such as having children. Women with children earn less, but childless women earn about the same as men.
Another fact is the influence of hypergamy, which means that women typically choose a mate (husband or boyfriend) who earns more than she does. Men don't have the same preference for a higher-earning mate.
While women prefer to HAVE a higher-earning partner, men generally prefer to BE the higher-earning partner in a relationship. This simple but profound difference between the sexes has powerful consequences for the so-called pay gap.
Suppose the pay gap between men and women were magically eliminated. If that happened, simple arithmetic suggests that half of women would be unable to find what they regard as a suitable mate.
Obviously, I'm not saying women won't date or marry a lower-earning men, only that they probably prefer not to. If a higher-earning man is not available, many women are more likely not to marry at all.
In colleges, there are no gender separations in courses of study, and students can freely choose their majors. There are no male and female math classes. But women generally choose college courses that pay less in the labor market.
Those are the choices that women themselves make. Those choices contribute to the pay gap, just as much as the choice of a job with flexible hours and pleasant working conditions.
The pay gap between men and women is not all bad because it helps to promote and sustain marriages. Since husband and wife generally pool their incomes into a single economic unit, what really matters is the combined family income, not the pay gap between them.
In two segments of our population, the pay gap has virtually ceased to exist. In the African-American community and in the millennial generation (ages 18 to 32), women earn about the same as men, if not more.
It just so happens that those are the two segments of our population in which the rate of marriage has fallen the most. Fifty years ago, about 80 percent of Americans were married by age 30; today, less than 50 percent are.
Just a coincidence? I think not. The best way to improve economic prospects for women is to improve job prospects for the men in their lives, even if that means increasing the so-called pay gap.
The real economic story of the past 30 years is that women's pay has effectively risen to virtual parity, but men's pay has stagnated and thousands of well-paid blue-collar jobs have been shipped to low-wage countries. Nobody should be surprised that the marriage rate has fallen, the age of first marriage has risen, and marriage, in general, has become more unstable.
LOVE Phyllis Schlafly, a long-time warrior of conservatism. I wish more men had her stamina and gonads.
She raises some good points.
I had to laugh, as the president talked of this issue last week. CNN did a story which showed that the White House staff has a pay disparity between men and women.
Jay Carney was asked about it, and stumbled and mumbled about it, and finally said it was because various jobs at the White House pay differently based on skills and experience. He made the conservatives point for us, that, this alleged pay gap is not due to paying a female less because she is a female, but because different jobs pay differently based on the skills needed for the job.
She raises some good points.
I had to laugh, as the president talked of this issue last week. CNN did a story which showed that the White House staff has a pay disparity between men and women.
Jay Carney was asked about it, and stumbled and mumbled about it, and finally said it was because various jobs at the White House pay differently based on skills and experience. He made the conservatives point for us, that, this alleged pay gap is not due to paying a female less because she is a female, but because different jobs pay differently based on the skills needed for the job.
I’m a guy and I’ll pass on having ovaries thank you.
Still, this whole “liberal” schtick is about punking society, about reinventing it for the sake of the pride of reinvention rather than for the sake of a closer approach to righteousness and virtue. The good Lord made women and men with different fortes. Why do our dear “diversity” mongers suddenly go missing when this truth is, for the jillionth time, highlighted?
Yup
Women’s equality in the marketplace of employment is a non-issue issue, one of a litany of make work issues the left hands off to Republicans to damage them before elections. Throw them out there, and see if they will stick long enough for the leftist media to get some traction in the mushy brains of Americans. Oh look! There’s amnesty, women’s issues, minimum wage, all distractions that the left doesn’t give one crap about, but they aren’t Obamacare, unemployment and the constantly diminishing quality of life Americans are experiencing. Get back to the tyranny, corruption, abuse of power, encroaching government and the deconstruction of free enterprise and liberty.
That will change as those women get older and less pleasant to look at.
Seems a little off topic...The debate is about men and women doing exactly the same job and the women getting paid less for the same work...NOT that women in general make less money than men...
Women’s societies and liberals reacted to seeing what they thought was gratuitous worship of masculinity, with gratuitous worship of femininity.
There have always been self pride and ego problems in fallen humanity. But our dear liberals are so good at throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
No, liberals keep conflating those issues.
Even in “same job” situations, the guys often put out more than nominal when the gals won’t, or they are likely to have more experience. It’s a guy thing to work hard in business. It’s a gal thing to work hard in the home (when her wits have not been stolen away by modern feminists).
Dems would be more honest if they just proposed a bill that says that the labor department dictates every wage for every job in America at all times,
forget performance,
equality and fairness trump performance and productivity.
Would cut down on lawsuit chaos.
If a female does the same job as the guy in the picture and does it as good as he does, she should definitely get the same pay. On the other had if a male does a job that normally is done by women, the same rule should apply
Don’t tempt them.
It would work out to rough parity by means of laissez-faire. The idea of enlightened feminism isn’t new. It’s at least as old as Proverbs 31, where this lady kept busy at home and on the side, and she contributed to her family’s renown. She’d not bother if she was always doomed to get a raw deal.
How about single payer ?? LOL
Single payer! Everybody is now a bureaucrat!
Some kind of cacotopia.
Couldn't it be all paid for just by raising taxes on rich peoples yachts?
Then it would be *free*
Thurstan Howell the III on Gilligan Island always seems to have extra $$$.
I always wondered why he took the trip on Skippers boat when he has those huge yachts sitting around anyway.
I'm in IT, which is a male dominated profession if I've ever seen one. No equal opportunity hires ... or those who are find other places to work, very quickly. For the most part, the women who I work with - who've done this long enough to survive the brutal "weed-outs" - are meticulous, thorough, and very, very smart.
They need to be, because (IMO) they can't work the stupid hours that men do. I've had positions where I've had to put in 24, 48, or 72 hours straight. 120 hours a week, for an extended time, was not unusual on one project. Ergo, guys do the IT jobs not in spite of women's efforts, but because there are so few women who physically can do them, and fewer still who want to.
And don't get me started on "Power Company Lineman", or any number of other well-paid, physical jobs.
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