Just before the midterm elections, the White House has issued a new report showing that women are doing better than men … so they need more government help, including passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill that would vastly expand the role of government in employers’ compensation decisions.
American women face an unemployment rate that is almost 2 percentage points lower than men, they are awarded a larger share of B.A.s, M.A.s, and Ph.Ds, and they hold 51.4 percent of management positions, says the report.
According to the White House, “Between 1997 and 2007, the number of women-owned businesses grew by 44 percent, twice as fast as men-owned firms. … Total sales of women-owned, privately held firms totaled over $1.2 trillion in 2007, an increase of 46 percent since 1997.
“During this period, women-owned businesses added roughly 500,000 jobs, while other private firms lost jobs.”
Rather than recommending ways to help men, the report concludes that because women are the primary or secondary earner in nearly two-thirds of families, they need government help to make their wages higher.
The White House report repeats the old canard that women only make 77 cents on a man’s dollar in order to justify more help for women. This figure averages the wages of all full-time men and women, without accounting for different jobs, experience, and time in the work force.
Labor Department data show that comparing men and women who work 40 hours weekly yields a wage ratio of 86 percent. Comparing earnings of single, childless men and women gets a ratio of 95 percent, even before accounting for different education, jobs, or experience.
The right way to measure earnings differentials is to take men and women who are in the same jobs at the same company and who have the same education, experience, and productivity. Many economic studies show that when women work at the same jobs as men, with the same accumulated lifetime work experience, they earn essentially the same salary.
If a woman is not being paid the same as a similarly situated man, she can sue for discrimination. With numerous anti-discrimination laws, such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Equal Pay Act, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (signed into law by President Obama in January 2009), women have remedies for discrimination, and use them.
Marriage and children explain some of the gap, because many mothers like to spend time with their children and value flexible schedules, and sometimes these jobs pay less. The White House report emphasizes the need for employers to offer flexible schedules and allow telecommuting, but some jobs can be done on flexible schedules from home, and others can’t.
The Paycheck Fairness Act was one of the first bills that the House of Representatives passed in January 2009. Just before the Senate adjourned on Sept. 29, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., took procedural steps that could lead to a Senate vote in the lame duck session after the elections.
The bill would require the government to collect information on workers’ pay, by race and sex, with the goal of equalizing wages of men and women by raising women’s wages. The bill would burden employers with more regulations and paperwork, further discouraging hiring of men and women, and encouraging firms to move work offshore.
A woman who chooses a job with a flexible schedule in order to balance family and career might think of herself as successful. But to the White House she is a failure because she is on a lower earnings path than a man, and has not selected the chief executive officer track.
The White House report shows that women are succeeding in America. The danger is not that women have insufficient remedies for discrimination or paths to the corner office, but that Congress will interfere and further slow the economy, reducing job opportunities and family income.
Examiner Columnist Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. She is the author of “How Obama’s Gender Policies Undermine America “(Encounter Books, 2010).
