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More on Equal Pay
OK, I'm going to wade into the hornet's nest on the equal-pay bill. Before I begin, let me say that I actually tried to read the Senate bill and have now decided to give up my dream of running for legislative office someday, because it's hard to decipher the gibberish without reading 20 other pieces of legislation.
The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act does does seem "mild," as Richard Ford puts it so well (and this post explains it quite well, for the nonlawyers among us), though I do think it would probably lead to more lawsuits, not fewer. But I think there are multiple and complex reasons besides plain old discrimination that women make less than men, and not only does this bill not address these, but they aren't necessarily problems that can be fixed by any legislation. For example, how many of us take jobs that might be less financially rewarding but allow for flexibility so that we can be home when our kids need us or so that we can dash out for the 3 p.m. piano recital? How many women choose to take a few years off to spend time with their kids while they are young? That inevitably leads to situations in which 40-year-old men are making more money than 40-year-old women doing the same job, because they have more experience. Clearly, if the situation is reversed, and a man has taken a few years off to stay at home, his female co-worker who hired a nanny and slogged through 50-hour work weeks should be making the bigger salary.
I look at how the business world has changed since I was a kid watching my parents hard at work, and I think one of the great improvements that women (with the help of technology) have brought to the workforce is a better grasp of work-life balance. Would men have figured out the benefits of telecommuting on their own? Or flexible scheduling or job sharing? Maybe, maybe not. We have a long, long way to go, and pay equity is an enormous part of that. But I think the solutions are more likely to come from within—more women executives, more women running businesses—than to come from on high by government decree.
Lastly, I don't want to get to a place in our society where the government is deciding what jobs are worthy of what wages (and, yes, I know this bill doesn't do that), because I think one of the costs would be that employers would respond to that infringement on their rights by becoming less accommodating of their employees. And that would be giving up a whole lot of what we've worked for.
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