Will Women Ever Get Paid What They Deserve? By Martha Burk, TomPaine.com

[Demeter]

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/50110/

Will Women Ever Get Paid What They Deserve?


By Martha Burk, TomPaine.com
Posted on April 12, 2007, Printed on April 12, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/50110/

We're coming up on Equal Pay Day again. That's the day in April every year -- this year the 24th -- when women's earnings finally catch up with what men made by Dec. 31 of the previous year. Women's groups, led by the National Committee on Pay Equity, will rally on Capitol Hill to call attention to the issue.

The pay gap is still a stubborn problem, with women who work full time year-round making 76 cents to a man's dollar. Though it consistently polls No. 1 with female voters in election years, politicians don't seem motivated to do much about it.

Some people say pay disparities between women and men are an illusion -- women just like to choose jobs that pay less because they're not as risky or have shorter hours. But the data don't back up these claims. Even when researchers take into account such factors as part-time work or time out of the work force to care for kids, the numbers show that men make more. Another problem that just won't go away is that so-called "men's jobs," like plumbing, pay more than "women's jobs," like nursing. That tells us something about what we value as a society, and it's not women's work.

The Fair Pay Act, a bill that would help narrow the gap, has grown old bouncing around Capitol Hill since the early 1990s, never receiving as much as a hearing. If the FPA ever passed, it would require employers to rate their jobs on skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions, and equalize pay for comparable jobs even if the job titles and duties are different. Employers naturally resist this, citing loss of "competitive advantage," but women's advocates suspect the real reason is that the numbers would be too damning. Women might even get big ideas like suing their employers for sex discrimination in pay and promotion, as female workers at Wal-Mart have done in the largest class-action suit in history.


Martha Burk is the money editor for Ms. Magazine and author of "Cult of Power: Sex Discrimination in the Workplace and What Can Be Done About It."

[Wilber_Stool]

1. Will anybody ever get paid what they deserve?.....n/t

[Demeter]

3. Dubya Surely Won't

Dollars don't come in negative denominations.

[Solo_in_MD]

2. Comprable worth and the FPA will never pass, it works directly against the market system

The key is equal pay for equal work/equal qualifications, which is much more the rule these days. Teachers with 10 years of experience in the same fields make the same money. Same with government, police, nursing, or union jobs. Has anyone seen active pay discrimination between objectively equivalent people in a company these days? If there was it would be sued to oblivion in nanoseconds and rightly so.

The real issue here is choices people make. 60 percent of undergraduates are women. However they are choosing mostly liberal arts fields which do not pay nearly as well as the technical fields. However, it is their choice to study English vs Physics. Liberal arts majors are getting around $32K a year while the geeks are getting $50K, regardless of gender.

The Comparable Worth concept in the FPA is attempting to draw comparisons between nurses and plumbers etc. It ignores the labor market where scarce skills command a premium. For that reason alone it should rightly fail.

[Demeter]

4. Logical in Theory, But Blown out of the Water In Practice

Ask a woman in engineering or science. Or management, for that matter.

[Solo_in_MD]

5. As in my mother, daughters and wife?

Mom saw some issues, but saw them start to go away as she neared retirement
Wife saw issues early, then saw it go away.
Daughters have never seen it.

I would call that progress. They are all technical, management or both

[Demeter]

6. How Fortunate For Your Family

If theirs were the only data on this issue, it MIGHT be significant.

[Solo_in_MD]

7. I'm serious that the income disaparity in younger college grads is due in large part to thier choice

and that in the technical fields, equal pay for equal work is pretty much the norm.