Women in the Lower Hudson Valley earn 83 cents for every dollar the average man earns, according to the U.S. Labor Department. With the national average at 77 cents, women in the region fare better than women nationwide.
The comparatively better local figure earns no praise from the region”™s long-serving female in the U.S. House of Representatives, Nita Lowey. She is now working to revive a plan that failed last year to level the paying field. She calls the disparity “shameful.”
But what Lowey sees as a remedy for gender-based discrimination is, in the eyes of a pair of prominent business groups, another regulatory millstone that threatens to drown them. Key to their argument is that differing jobs merit different pay ”“ apples and oranges ”“ despite efforts to quantify and analogize every task. They see changes to the current law leading to “second guessing” of pay decisions in the courts.
In Lowey”™s District 18, the Labor Department reports the average male earns $67,866, while the average female earns 83 percent of that: $56,507.
In Sean Patrick Maloney”™s District 19, the numbers are $64,051 for men and $50,774 for women, a gap of 21 percent.
In Eliot Engel”™s District 17, men earn $50,165 to women”™s $43,059, a 14 percent gap.
The Paycheck Fairness Act has been reintroduced in the 113th Congress and Lowey is a co-sponsor of the bill. She reports it is currently pending in the Education and the Workforce Committee. There is also a so-called “discharge petition” circulating in Washington, D.C., which Lowey has signed. If the petition gets 218 signatures the bill will have to be considered by the full House of Representatives. As of April 22, the discharge petition had 188 signatures, Lowey said.
“Our country has a shameful wage gap,” Lowey told the Business Journals via email. “The women of this country and their families deserve better. That”™s why I voted for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and why I am a co-sponsor of the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would strengthen and close loopholes in the 50-year-old Equal Pay Act.”
The Lilly Ledbetter Act was passed in 2009 and is credited with improving women”™s pay via legal recourse. Lowey and others cite pay data that demonstrate the law is flawed and needs revision.
The Paycheck Fairness Act looks to close perceived loopholes in federal wage regulations, including more workplace openness concerning wages. The new law also targets sex-based discrimination in general and imposes stronger deterrents to stop it.
The Paycheck Fairness Act differs from the Fair Pay Act, also as yet unpassed, which would ensure equal pay for jobs that are comparable, but not identical.
The 160,000-member American Association of University Women is backing both resolutions: the Paycheck Fairness Act (H.R. 377) and the Fair Pay Act (438).
Paying men more than women for the same job has been illegal since 1963. But enforcement of the law is weak, contend supporters of the Paycheck Fairness Act, including the American Association of University Women, which has winnowed the data and claims a third of the pay disparity cannot be reasoned as anything but discrimination.
Opponents believe otherwise.
“It would no longer be permissible to pay employees differently based on market forces, negotiating ability or even the amount of revenue they generate for the employer”™s bottom line unless the employer could prove it was a ”˜business necessity,”™” reports the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in a message to members.
The Paycheck Fairness Act, the chamber contends, “would open up compensation and employment decisions to second-guessing by courts and juries, and would ultimately lead to an inefficient, cumbersome and costly salary-setting process.”
The National Association of Manufacturers in a recent letter to U.S. senators, said, “It also would allow women to seek compensatory and punitive damages for pay disparities, and make it easier to pursue class-action lawsuits in these cases. As a result, employers would be exposed to increased threats of litigation ”“ even when unintentional pay disparities may have occurred.
“The Paycheck Fairness Act almost certainly would compel many employers to purchase additional legal liability insurance, increasing their costs and limiting their ability to raise wages, increase benefits or hire new workers,” said the manufacturers”™ letter.
Both the national chamber of commerce and national manufacturers contend the real beneficiaries of this law would be trial lawyers, not women.
When the Paycheck Fairness Act was scuttled last year, U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said, “Shortchanging women on the job doesn”™t just rob them of a fair paycheck. It makes families less secure and slows economic growth across the board. With more dual-income households than ever, and with more families relying on working mothers to make ends meet, the key to economic growth and security for the middle class is equal pay for women.”
The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reports 41.5 percent of New York state households rely on women as the primary breadwinners and that women account for 42.6 percent of all family earnings. Those numbers, among others, have led to the naming of April 9 as Equal Pay Day, “a day symbolizing when ”“ more than three months into the year ”“ women”™s wages finally catch up to what men were paid in the previous year,” Lowey said.
As Senate bill No. 84, Lowey reports the Paycheck Fairness Act could reach the Senate floor this month, but is unlikely to muster the 60 votes required to move it forward toward a possible House reconciliation effort.
Probably most of women’s pay-equity advocates think employers are greedy profiteers who’d hire only illegal immigrants for their lower labor cost if they could get away with it. Or move their business to a cheap-labor country to save money. Or replace older workers with younger ones for the same reason. So why do these same advocates think employers would NOT hire only women if, as they say, employers DO get away with paying females at a lower rate than males for the same work?
Here’s one of countless examples showing that some of the most sophisticated women in the country choose to earn less while getting paid at the same rate as their male counterparts:
“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.†ama-assn.org/amednews/2012/03/26/bil10326.htm
A thousand laws won’t close that gap.
In fact, 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 – 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 thousands of company mentors for women, not the horde of overseers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and not the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which is another feel-good bill that turned into another do-nothing law (good intentions do not necessarily make things better; sometimes, the path to a worse condition is paved with good intentions)…. 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 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 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 are husbands.)
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 (tinyurl.com/3a5nlay)
-work fewer hours than their male counterparts, or work less than full-time instead of full-time (as in the above example regarding physicians)
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, thereby increasing HIS pay.
Women who make these choices are generally able to do so because they are supported — or, if unmarried, anticipate being supported — by a husband who feels pressured to earn more than if he’d chosen never to marry. (Married men earn more than single men, but 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.
More in “Will the Ledbetter Act Help Women?” at malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/will-the-ledbetter-fair-pay-act-help-women/