Equal Pay
Tuesday, April 28, 2009 Labels: politics 1 commentsToday is "Equal Pay Day" for women -- but not all women agree the day is necessary.
Equal Pay Day -- started in 1996 by the National Committee on Pay Equity -- is allegedly the day in the year when women have worked far enough to make up for the pay discrimination they faced the previous year. According to government statistics, women only make 78 cents for every dollar a man earns.
Allison Kasic with the Independent Women's Forum comments on those findings.
"Now while that is technically correct if you look at the Department of Labor statistics, it's only a single variable comparison. It's only comparing the median wage of the full-time working woman to the median wage of the full-time working man," she notes. "It doesn't take into account a variety of other factors that need to be taken into account if we're going to have a realistic conversation about wage issues."
She says the study does not consider other factors such as workplace experience, education level, or occupation. Once such factors are taken into account, she says, any "wage gap" shrinks away.
Kasic believes equal pay is mostly a non-issue, and that new legislation -- like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, or the Paycheck Fairness Act -- is not needed to tackle any perceived problems. She argues that sponsors of such measures are "exploiting" the wage gap to advance their own agenda.
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Only a woman could say, with a straight face, that even though she stayed out of the workplace for 10 years raising kids, she's every bit as valuable as the men who stayed in for all of those years and should be paid the same. If a man said that, he'd be laughed out of the room and would never hear the end of it.