Marco Rubio Dismisses Lilly Ledbetter Equal Pay Act As A Boon To ‘Trial Lawyers’

Ultimately, the sole driving force behind all "gender equal pay" legislation is the belief that women earn 77 cents to men's dollar in the same jobs.

The figures are arrived at by comparing the sexes' median incomes: women's median is 77 percent of men's. In 2009, the median income of full-time, year-round workers was $47,127 for men, compared to $36,278 for women or 77 percent of men's median. http://tinyurl.com/5pl8or

Median means 50% of workers earn above the figures and 50% below. That means that a lot of female workers in the higher ranges of women's median make more money than a lot of male workers in the lower ranges of men's median. Which is why the October 2012 Atlantic Monthly can report:

“In nearly 40 percent of American marriages, the wife earns more than the husband” — quite at odds with "women earn 77 cents to men's dollar."

The advocates' interpretation of “women's 77 cents to men's dollar" doesn't account for the number of hours worked each week, experience, seniority, training, education or even the job description itself. It compares all women to all men, not people in the same job with the same experience. So the salary of a 60-year-old male computer engineer with 30 years at his company is weighed against that of a young first-year female teacher. Also, men are much more likely than women to work two jobs; hence, more often than a woman, a man earning 50,000 from two jobs is weighed against a women earning $25,000 from one job, so that he appears to be unfairly earning twice as much as she.

Thus, contrary to what pay-equity advocates say, women's 77 cents to men's dollar does NOT mean women are paid less than men in the same jobs. Nor does it mean, even more incredibly in the vein of “men are stronger than women” (which means to many that every man is stronger than every woman), that every woman earns 23% less than every man, perhaps leading some of the more benighted and the blinkered ideological to believe Diane Sawyer of ABC News earns less than the young man walking back and forth on the street wearing a “Pizzas $5” sign.

Over the decades, strategically ignoring the true meaning of "women's 77 cents to men's dollar" has been less than productive:

No law yet has closed the gender wage gap — not the 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, not Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, not affirmative action (which has benefited mostly white women, the group most vocal about the wage gap – http://tinyurl.com/74cooen), not the 1991 amendments to Title VII, not the 1991 Glass Ceiling Commission created by the Civil Rights Act, not the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, not diversity, not the countless state and local laws and regulations, not the horde of overseers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and not the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act…. Nor will a "paycheck fairness" law work.

That's because women's pay-equity advocates, who always insist one more law is needed, continue to overlook the effects of female AND male behavior:

Despite the 40-year-old demand for women's equal pay, millions of wives still choose to have no pay at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of "The Secrets of Happily Married Women," stay-at-home wives, including the childless who represent an estimated 10 percent, constitute a growing niche. "In the past few years,” he says in a CNN report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier….” at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka. If indeed a higher percentage of women is staying at home, perhaps it's because feminists and the media have told women for years that female workers are paid less than men in the same jobs — so why bother working if they're going to be penalized and humiliated for being a woman.)

As full-time mothers or homemakers, stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living in luxury? Answer: Because they're supported by their husband, an “employer” who pays them to stay at home. (Far more wives are supported by a spouse than husbands are.)

The implication of this is probably obvious to most 12-year-olds but seems incomprehensible to or is ignored by feminists and the liberal media: If millions of wives are able to accept NO wages, millions of other wives, whose husbands' incomes vary, are more often able than husbands to:

-accept low wages.
-refuse overtime and promotions.
-choose jobs based on interest first, wages second — the reverse of what men tend to do.
-take more unpaid days off.
-avoid uncomfortable wage-bargaining (http://tinyurl.com/3a5nlay).
-work part-time instead of full-time (“In 2011, 22% of male physicians and 44% of female physicians worked less than full time, up from 7% of men and 29% of women from Cejka’s 2005 survey.” http://tinyurl.com/7la747z).

Any one of these job choices lowers women's median pay relative to men's. And when a wife makes one of the choices, her husband often must take up the slack.

Women are able to make these choices because they are supported — or, if unmarried, anticipate being supported — by a husband who must earn more than if he'd chosen never to marry. (Still, even many men who shun marriage, unlike their female counterparts, feel their self worth is tied to their net worth.) This is how MEN help create the wage gap: as a group they tend more than women to pass up jobs that interest them for ones that pay well.

So we can stop blaming the income gap on women's job choices and start blaming it on the choices of both sexes. Which is to say, blaming no one. Which means ending the "equal pay" legislation that acts to lower wages for both male workers and female workers and to create higher prices for customers.

Points to ponder:

If the roles were reversed so that men raised the children and women raised the income, men would average lower pay than women.

Why would "greedy, profit-obsessed" employers, many of whom where possible hire illegal immigrants for their cheap labor, pay men more than women for the same work? If employers could get away with that, they would not hire one man, ever.

The power in money is not in earning it (there is only responsibility, sweat, and stress in earning money). The power in money is in SPENDING it. And, Warren Farrell says in “The Myth of Male Power,” "Women control consumer spending by a wide margin in virtually every consumer category." Women (white women) also control most of the wealth. See http://www.she-conomy.com/facts-on-women (Women's control over spending, adds Farrell, gives women control over TV programs.)

Much more in "Will the Ledbetter Act Help Women?" at http://tinyurl.com/blge6fm.