Last week Erin defined feminism more or less as a movement towards equality, as it should be. I think everybody agrees, whether or not a person identifies him/herself as a “feminist,” that women should be equal to men in the eyes of the law. That having been said, I find Erin’s classification of one of the most tenured and respected members of the United States Senate, John McCain of Arizona, as “evil” to be disappointing and out of character for her. To address this claim re quires an in depth look at the common rallying cry of “equal pay for equal work.”
The commonly cited claim by Democrats, male and female, is that women earn only 77 percent of what men earn. If this statistic was factual, and based on discrimination, then a sufficiently-buttressed version of the Fair Pay Act would be “must-pass legislation.” However, the Fair Pay Act, as proposed by President Obama, addresses no such issue of discrimination and actually could harm women and their interests. The fatal flaw in the 77 percent statistic is in the way that it is calculated. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) simply took the average earnings of full time female and male workers and held them up next to each other. This methodology fails to take into account several relevant factors, most egregiously of which was hours worked. The BLS defines full time as 35 hours a week. However, as noted by Bloomberg news, there is a growing culture of “over-work,” defined as working more than 50 hours a week.
Moreover, men are much more likely to “over-work” than women, which is a large factor in the “wage gap”. The American Enterprise Institute, in 2012, found that when you control for variables like level of education, amount of work experience, number of hours worked, so you actually compare men and women with similar backgrounds working in the same position, the gap almost disappears. The pay gap is more likely to be a result of factors other than discrimination. Moreover, passing the Fair Pay Act could increase the risk put on employers for employing women. If women are seen by employers as more likely to sue the company on the basis of perceived discrimination, then employers will simply hire more men.
A second often cited claim is that the pay-gap is created by a disparity between the market value of jobs mostly held by men and those mostly held by women. This argument has a little bit more standing than the pay gap argument, due to the fact that men are more likely to hold certain types of jobs than women, be it software coding, finance, etc. The remedy to this “market value” problem, according to the proposal’s supporters, would be to regulate pay between jobs held by men and jobs held by women of similar “comparable worth.” The problem with this is that there is no good way to evaluate “comparable worth” in a way that would make pay exactly equal. It would involve a disruption of market forces on wages, which would lead to unintended consequences. The Ninth Circuit Court of appeals struck down a Washington State law equalizing pay based on worth in 1985. The now Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy ruled that “neither law nor logic deems the free market system a suspect enterprise.”
A third claim from the left is that women often do not hold a proportional number of leadership positions in business and politics. This is a real problem, but to propel to the top women who may not be best suited for the job simply based on their gender does not do their cause much justice and could prove dangerous if that office is one of great public interest.
Think about the issue like this, most business and political leaders of great rank most likely graduated from college in the 1960s or 1970s. In that time period, women in general received far fewer advanced degrees than men did. I would argue that this trend, regardless of whether it is just or unjust, is reflected in our upper class of business and political leaders. This trend has since rapidly reversed. The American Enterprise Institute notes that women earned 52 percent of all doctoral degrees, 58 percent of all master’s degrees, and 62 percent of associate’s degrees in 2013, and dominated in certain fields, including health sciences. I would say that this trend pretty clearly demonstrates that women are on the rise, and that there is a large pool of qualified and capable female leaders who will take center stage in the years ahead. As much as this set of statistics demonstrates how far women have come, it also denotes a growing problem of male underachievement.
Christina Hoff Sommers has published a book entitled The War Against Boys, and she brings up a lot of important points, mainly that our education system is failing young boys. Ms. Sommers asserts that the lack of competition and “boy-friendly activities”, like tug-of-war and other more “masculine” games in lower education, are causing boys to become disinterested in school and that these tendencies are interfering with young boy’s development. Ms. Sommers does not go as far as to say that these new policies, if reversed, would fix the underachievement of boys; however, they are certainly not helping. The Russell Sage Foundation notes that mean high school GPA differs greatly between boys and girls, with girls consistently scoring higher. Moreover, the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institution agree, that as the jobs shift away from physical labor and more towards knowledge based jobs, men may not be able to keep up if trends like these persist. Ms. Sommers argues that we may need to follow in the footsteps of the British and Australians, admitting that boys have different needs than girls in education, and that there may be a need to have gender separated and tailored curriculums.
