By Anna Daniels
from womensglib
Republicans have been having a hard time stringing words together when it comes to explaining why they don’t support pay equity for women. It’s a straightforward concept–equal pay for equal work. Yet it takes women until April 8 to catch up with men’s earnings from the previous year. The median earnings for a woman working a full time job is about 77% of a man’s. That figure drops for women of color and it hasn’t budged in more than a decade.
President Obama’s first action upon assuming office in 2009 was to sign the Lily Ledbetter Fair Wage Act. This act restored protection against wage discrimination that was stripped away by the Supreme Court’s decision in Ledbetter v Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. The act extended the period of time for employees to file claims for wages lost because of discrimination. Yet wage discrimination on the basis of gender continues to exist.
While Democrats have continued to push for paycheck fairness, which includes more pay transparency, Republicans have drawn upon their extensive arsenal of incoherence and sheer stupid to push back. Cari Christman, head of the Republican PAC RedState Women, recently opined that Republicans oppose the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act because “women want real-world solutions to this problem, not more rhetoric.” For clarification, she added that women are busy, women are extremely busy and women have busy lives.
Of course women are busy! They have to work longer hours to make the same amount as men. Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn has parsed the Republican position more succinctly. Women “don’t want” equal pay laws. Blackburn voted against the Lily Ledbetter Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act of 2009. Beth Cubriel, an ally of Texas Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott, explained that the gap exists because women are lousy at negotiating pay.
The Republican position on pay equity would be incomplete without some mansplaining. There is no wage gap and legislative action to close the gap would discriminate against men are the persuasive explanations that these guys are actually willing to say in public.
President Obama will issue two consecutive executive orders today intended to address the issue of unequal pay for equal work. And he will lobby the Senate to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. It remains to be seen whether the Republicans have figured out a winning strategy in attracting women voters.
Here’s a tip for busy women with busy lives who would really like a raise:
How to Get a Raise in 47 Seconds….
Anna Daniels
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Seems like the GOP, the Teas, the Jesus hustlers, the Bazzillionaires,
most of ’em, let’s face it, white males, are so many matches running
around looking for gasoline these days… about as persuasive as pollen
is to a sneeze. They seem desperate.
“It remains to be seen whether the Republicans have figured out a winning strategy in attracting women voters.” Republicans have no problem in attracting rich women or women whose husbands make so much money that they don’t have to work at all or women who are sucked in by hate talk radio – the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks of the world. And that includes a lot of poor women who live in the gun and hate culture which pervades much of the country.
Straight or gay… black, brown, beige, or white … from the north to the south pole… that Y chromosome carries a big stick and evolution is a s-l-0-w process…
I don’t disbute the percentage but a question I have is; is this gap due to actual lower wages than men in the same position? Say a women attorney is a partner at Acme Law Offices. Is she making less than the other partners? Or is the women plumber making less money than her male counterparts at very same company? Is it because women at whatever corporate office are not getting promoted as much as the men? Or is this due to less women working in these largely male dominated fields or is it a combo of all the above?
You have to ask where this statistic came from. Is it measured over the whole economy or is it a measure over job classifications in which men and women do exactly the same job for the same number of hours? Only the latter would make any statistical sense. The report says “jobs predominantly done by women pay less on average than jobs predominantly done by men”. That explains a lot right there. If the statistic is taken over a variety of job classifications for which women are predominantly employed in lesser paying professions, then the statistic makes no sense whatsoever.
John & Goatskull– here’s some analysis from Irin Carmon:
Not all of the pay gap can be explained by women’s choices, and many of those choices are made under discriminatory constraints. Conservatives often attack the “77 cents on the dollar figure” because it doesn’t account for the fact that women are concentrated in lower-paying jobs or may work fewer hours. But as White House economic adviser Betsey Stevenson recently explained in an interview with msnbc, “Some of women’s choices come because they experience sexism. Some of women’s choices come because they are disproportionately balancing the needs of work and family. Which of these choices should we consider legitimate choices, and which of them should we consider things that we have a societal obligation to try to mitigate?” She added, “Much of what we need to do to close that gap is to change the constraints that women face. And there are things we haven’t tried.”
When all other factors are identical, the gap shrinks but does not disappear. A study by the American Association of University Women found that among recent college graduates with matching credentials, a quarter of the pay gap, or 5%, remained. Ten years later, it grew to 12%. Meanwhile, pay gaps widen in situations where there is overall income inequality – including in this country, where women make up nearly two-thirds of minimum wage workers and are underrepresented in the highest-paying fields, such as technology and finance.
Note that when all other factors are identical (think Lily Ledbetter), the gap shrinks but does not disappear.
The statistic of 77 % is from the Census Bureau report.” On Tuesday, the Census Bureau released new numbers showing that the gender wage gap was 77 percent in 2012, meaning women make just 77 cents for each dollar a man makes. Median earnings for men working full-time were $49,400 while women’s were just $37,800. These numbers didn’t show any significant change from 2011 and there hasn’t been an increase since 2007.”