There is an article on CNN Money today by Fortune assistant managing editor Cait Murphy about how Obama's support of Sen. Tom Harkin's (D-IA) Fair Pay Act of 2007, which would establish guidelines for whether companies are discriminating against one sex of employees by paying them less than their counterparts, is boneheaded and so out of style.
Murphy opens by acknowledging that a report published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that:
In 2005, women who were full-time wage and salary workers had median weekly earnings of $585, or 81 percent of the $722 median for their male counterparts.
It is nice to see that Murphy can state the obvious, but she then backtracks in the most awkward way:
What is more dubious, though, is the assumption that is the heart of the Fair Pay Act: that discrimination is the reason for all or most of the difference. And the act's remedies are absurdly misguided, injecting the federal government into the most routine pay decisions.
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Let's start with the dubious. To the Fair Pay Act's backers, the simple fact that women make 81% of men's full-time earnings is in and of itself proof of discrimination, past and present. Only a pig-headed sexist would argue otherwise.
Or maybe not. June O'Neill, a certifiably female economist who served as director of the Congressional Budget Office under President Clinton, wrote a peer-reviewed paper for the American Economic Review (May 2003), trying to account for the pay gap. What she found was that women are much more likely over the course of their lives to cut back their hours or quit work altogether than men.
More precisely, of women aged 25-44 with young children, more than a third were out of the labor force; of those women who did have jobs, 30% worked part-time. (The comparable numbers for men were 4% out of the labor force and 2% working part-time).
All told, women are more than twice as likely to work part-time as men and over the course of their lifetimes, work outside the home for 40% fewer years than men. That accounts for a significant chunk of the pay gap. Then there is a more subtle factor. Despite the many advances the women's movement has brought the U.S., what it hasn't done, thank heavens, is make men and women the same. The simple fact is - and there is nothing nasty or conspiratorial about it - the sexes continue to choose different avenues of study and different types of jobs.
Let's start with her first claim: discrimination is not the reason for most of the difference. Her first support (bring out the Democrats!!! Never mind that we not talking about a progressive when it came to business), shows that she cannot read. The first line of the BLS report refers to "full time wage and salary workers." If she could read and comprehend that, why would she trot out an argument about women with part time jobs and women who are not working?
Her next dubious step, that because all women work 40% fewer years than men work, they do not deserve to get paid as much as men do. First, she is mixing apples and oranges because that statistic refers to all women whereas the report refers to full-time workers. Second, this implies that a woman is somehow less capable than a man if she has not worked as long as he has, a laughable line of reasoning.
Her next support - by the way, is she being sarcastic when she says thank heavens that men and women are not [paid] the same? I do not think she is. Also, if she is not talking about pay then she is deceptively blurring the argument - is also a triple fudge sundae of duplicity.
Here's an illustrative example. The college majors with the top starting salaries, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, are: chemical engineering (almost $60,000), computer engineering, electrical engineering, industrial engineering, mechanical engineering. Men make up about 80% of engineering majors. Women predominate among liberal arts majors - whose salaries start at a little more than $30,000.
Here's another illustrative example. If I used Alaska - or Tennessee, or any single state - to generalize about the population, demographics and economics of the U.S., you would laugh me out of the room. The same goes for Murphy. If Murphy had bothered to do the slightest bit of legwork and cross-reference that argument to actual employment statistics she never could have made it with a straight face. Just exactly how many engineers are there that Murphy feels comfortable citing them to show that overall women make less than men because there are more men in the highest paying field and so many of them that they skew overall pay figures?
The answer is not that many. According to the BLS' employment by occupational group figures, there are about 2.5 million architects and engineers, and 3 million computer and mathematical science professionals, out of a total of 132.5 million employees. Even if we assume those fields are 100% male, their percentage of the workforce does not work out to any greater than 4.2%. I would like to see Murphy assert that 4.2% of the workforce accounts for 19% of the sex pay gap in the entire labor market.
A shorter version of the rest of her argument against the act goes something like: OOOGAH BOOGAH!!! TAXES!!! REGULATION BAD!!!! FREEE MARKET!!! FREE!!!!!
I am serious:
The Fair Pay Act is, in short, madness. And it is troubling that Obama has associated himself with this kind of legislation - a position that has the feel of a pander to the feminist left. It is certainly not sound economics.
After destroying her unsound statistics, I am in no mood to believe anything Cait Murphy has to say. Supporting such an act means supporting the notion that all people are equal (or, at least that there is no reason to discriminate against a person based on his or her sex, apparently an argument that Cait Murphy has a huge problem with), not a pander to any specific group (when we do it, it are moral. When they do it, it is politics). Supporting equality between men and women is a moral good.
Murphy has a lot of nerve to publish an article like this in the recent wake of Ledbetter, which gave ample evidence of a woman who worked just as hard and for just as long as her male counterparts, yet was continuously and conclusively discriminated against because of her sex. I wonder if Murphy knows how well she is paid in comparison to her male counterparts. If she is paid less than they are I wonder if she ok with that because she is more likely to work part-time or take time off, or simply because, thank heavens, men and women are not the same. Even if she is, she has no right to project that mindset onto others.
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