In recognition of Equal Pay Day Tuesday, Betsey Stevenson, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, wrote an entry on the White House blog entitled Five Facts About the Gender Pay Gap. While touching on a number of factors influencing the “gender pay gap,” Stevenson cites “motherhood” as one such factor.
However, rather than present it as a natural choice women make, along with their mates, to enhance their lives and in turn benefit society, “motherhood” is said to be “associated with a wage penalty and lower future career earnings.” The article goes on to tout the career-earnings benefits that accrue from delaying childbirth and asserts that women who might otherwise leave the workforce could be persuaded to stay with better paid family and sick leave policies and “therefore bolster their lifelong earnings.”
The full write up on the impact of motherhood on the “gender pay gap” reads as follows:
Throughout the article, Stevenson seems reluctant to acknowledge that other legitimate differences in choices women make versus men can also contribute to a pay gap. She notes that “women are still more likely to work in lower-paying occupations and industries,” but says it’s important to find out “what we can do to make it easier for women to succeed in high paying occupations.” Stevenson’s explanation seems to suggest that if men behaved differently, women might be better represented in some traditionally male-dominated fields:
Interestingly, as pointed out Tuesday by Mary Katharine Ham at Hot Air, Betsey Stevenson acknowledged, on Equal Pay Day 2014, the impact factors other than outright discrimination can have on the pay gap [emphasis added]:
Despite this 2014 admission, Stevenson, throughout her 2015 article, continually comes back to the “unexplained” differences in this “stubborn and troubling… large gender pay gap,” at one point even suggesting that “even though employers are prohibited from discriminating, in cultures of pay secrecy, it is more difficult to enforce non-discrimination requirements.” While grudgingly acknowledging that “women are more likely to take time out of the labor force and work fewer hours,” the White House’s message is clear: even though “American women have made tremendous strides,” the work will not be over until the gap is gone.
