59 Cents, and other rot: a look at some feminist myths

National Review, Jan 30, 2006 by Kate O'Beirne

Feminists have made the workplace worse by waging an ideological campaign to portray working women as a victimized class, discriminated against in pay and persistently preyed on by male oppressors. Not content with the equal opportunity women presently enjoy, the feminists reject other women's free choices and demand a strict regime to dictate wages.

The persistent fable that women are denied equal pay for equal work has been a never-empty tank of gas that fuels feminism. Since the 1960s, when feminists sported "59 cents" buttons, they have loudly claimed that the disparity between the average wages of men and women is the result of rampant sex discrimination. The demand that people be paid the same salary for doing the same job, regardless of their sex, naturally enjoys broad support. But a sympathetic public is largely unaware that the claim that women face widespread wage discrimination is a myth.

Disparities in wages do exist--but they are largely between women with children, on one hand, and men and single women, on the other. This is not sex discrimination, but rather the result of choices mothers freely make in their desire to balance work and family responsibilities.

Since the Equal Pay Act of 1963, sex discrimination in hiring, promotion, or pay has been illegal. While there might be isolated examples of sex discrimination in the workplace, our competitive economy demonstrably provides equal opportunity for women. But the wage warriors peddle victimhood and demand equal outcomes, regardless of individual priorities and choices. To make the case that women remain victimized, feminists point to average overall male and female wage numbers, rail against a "glass ceiling" that blocks women's ascent to the top ranks of American businesses, and decry "undervalued" women's work that condemns women in predominantly female fields to toiling in a "pink ghetto."

Like so many other female scribes, reporter Rachel Smolkin of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cited job segregation as strong evidence of sex discrimination in 2001, writing, "Women make up only 1.3 percent of plumbers, pipe fitters and steamfitters and only 1.2 percent of heating, air conditioning and refrigeration mechanics. ... These occupations offer men with high school educations well-paying opportunities that remain largely closed to women."

Feminist dogma demands that all discrepancies be seen as evidence of sex discrimination that will be eliminated only when women have achieved parity with men in all occupations. So American women, the most accomplished and liberated women in the history of the world, need gender preferences in the 21st century in order to compete. Only preferential treatment will achieve the longed-for goal of having women make up 50 percent of plumbers or pipe fitters.

If it is true that women work for salaries that are 25 percent less than what men with similar educations, skills, and job experiences would earn, American employers are guilty--of violating the law of supply and demand. With a cheap female-only workforce, an employer could bury his competition. (For a time: The resulting competition would bid up the price of female labor until we reached equal pay for equal work--which is what we have now.) Recent Census Bureau data reveal that, in 2003, college-educated black women, on average, earned more than college-educated white women ($41,100 a year versus $37,800). The report didn't raise outraged cries of discrimination against white women. Instead, it offered the uncontroversial explanation that minority women tended to work longer hours, hold more than one job, and take less time off after having a child. But such differences are dismissed out of hand when they apply to the wage gap between men and women.

In a classic example of how feminists ignore evidence against the existence of discrimination in order to make the case that women lace bias in the boardroom, authors Suzanne Nossel and Elizabeth Westfall devoted a book to the desperate plight of female lawyers. Presumed Equal: What America's Top Women Lawyers Really Think About Their Firms concluded that "systemic forces hold back women's progress and will continue to do so until institutional and societal changes are made," despite women's parity in law-school admissions and success in landing top legal jobs. Yet in Nossel and Westfall's own survey, women associates said that their prospects for promotion were equal to those of their male colleagues, "provided they [were] willing and able to put in the long hours and enormous energy." The attrition rate for women lawyers was admittedly higher than for men, largely owing to "the difficulty of sustaining a law firm career once one has children." The women surveyed by the authors showed "a keen awareness that the women who had achieved the greatest success in their firms did so at considerable cost."

A MATTER OF TRADEOFFS

Many of the women lawyers whose frustrated career aspirations were chronicled by Nossel and Westfall had clearly made personal decisions that affected their lives at the office. These tradeoffs between work and family explain some of the gap between the average wages of men and women, and are responsible for the figures that supposedly show a glass ceiling.