"EQUAL-PAY" DAY DEBUNKED IN 3 MINUTES
Today is what feminist groups have dubbed “Equal-Pay Day,” their day to raise awareness of how women are regularly paid less than men for the same work. Women, they claim, have had to work this long into 2013 to make up for last year’s wage gap.
The problem for “Equal-Pay Day” fans is that the premise of this pseudo holiday is bogus.
Women actually aren’t paid 77 percent for doing the same job. Take three minutes to watch this video just released by the Independent Women’s Forum which explains the statistics behind the wage gap and tells women the good news that they aren’t doomed to be victims of the patriarchy: It’s the choices that we make that will primarily determine how much we earn.Why is it important to highlight these falsehoods? Because this myth has already resulted in legislation, namely the deliberately mislabeled Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. This law, rammed through a Democrat-controlled Congress, was never really about equal pay for equal work. Obama himself admitted it in the second presidential debate. And Joe Biden admitted it as well a couple of days later.
Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that the law actually restricts female employment opportunities by discouraging companies from hiring women due to concerns about expensive and frivolous law suits. Far from being a genuinely pro-woman piece of legislation, it is rather a gift to trial lawyers (always big donors for Democrats), intended to help them file lawsuits and collect their fees.
As a piece of social legislation designed to improve women's wages in comparison to men, the Lilly Ledbetter Act is more likely to result in fewer employed females because firms fear potential litigation, adverse publicity from such cases, and the amount of resources they would have to devote to defending themselves against such claims.The fact of the matter is that Congress outlawed sex discrimination in wages nearly a half-century ago with the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and then expanded those protections with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 and the 1991 amendments to the Civil Rights Act. The Lilly Lebetter Act hardly belongs in the same category with those historic advances for women. Like so many of Obama's "accomplishments," this one is phony.
And speaking of Obama, the self-styled hero of women everywhere...
Obama's record on paying women White House aides not stellar
The White House Boys' Club: President Obama Has a Woman Problem
Book: Women in Obama White House felt excluded and ignored
Why Does Obama's White House Pay Women Less?
You get the idea. To further debunk the myth, I need to point out that women in tech make more money and land better jobs than men. And here is a list of American cities where single women (between the ages of 22 and 30) without children earn more than their male counterparts.
Do you know what we do care about? The economy and how it affects not only ourselves but our families. Not surprisingly, Obama wants to talk about everything but the economy. Yes, Dear Leader got himself reelected, but the people are starting to wake up. I just wish it had been sooner!
Great post, Moira. An honest broker of the truth saw this development years ago. It's infuriating to read people on our own side shy away from this and contribute to the "war on women" meme. One of the worst moments during the 2012 presidential debates was when Romney refused to talk straight to the young female schoolteacher who asked him about "equal pay."
ReplyDeleteSo-called job and wage discrimination by employers, insofar it existed in the past, was actually the correct assumption that, no matter their credentials, women, especially women in their peak years of fertility, are less devoted than men to their careers because they can return to the biologically inherited role of mother to her children. Notice how the gap has shrunk as American women have radically fewer children and much later in life (63.2 per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 in 2011, down from 122.7 in 1957).