• Twitter
  • Facebook
News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Closing the gap

The usual hand-wringing victimologists harangue us over the annual celebration of a phony issue:

In Indiana, women earn about 72 cents to every dollar a man does; nationwide the average is 77 cents.

About 30 people gathered Tuesday morning to highlight those facts at an Equal Pay Day rally at the Fort Wayne Women's Bureau, 2417 Fairfield Ave.

[. . .]

Members of the YWCA Northeast Indiana, League of Women Voters and American Association of University Women joined forces for the rally. Several politicians spoke, including State Reps. Phyllis Pond (R-New Haven), Win Moses (D-Fort Wayne), and Phil GiaQuinta (D-Fort Wayne).

[. . .]

“This is a people's issue as much as it is a woman's issue, and I also believe this needs to be looked at as an economic issue,” said Cheri Becker, executive director of Leadership Fort Wayne.

Becker said the Equal Pay Act was signed into law in 1963 and since then women have made very little progress in that area.

Harriet Miller, one of the founding members of the Fort Wayne Women's Bureau, said if legislators are not supporting equal pay, voters should fire them. Miller said employers should be held accountable for their actions.

GiaQuinta suggested electing more women to state and federal offices. He pointed out the number of women in the state legislature has been dwindling. Moses said he was optimistic about the coming year in the Legislature, but agreed there is a need for more women in state and federal government.

People who spout such nonsense expect us to buy the embedded assumption that discrimination is still keeping the little woman down so the sinister masters of the evil patriarchy can protect their ill-gotten gains. That would require us to ignore the specific circumstances of different employment histories and pretend the overall numbers are somehow meaningful. If we take into account the differences and compare apples to apples -- men and women with roughly the same education in roughly the same kinds of jobs -- the gap disappears.

Comments

Rebecca
Wed, 04/18/2012 - 10:26am

I am amused by the gullability of people to believe in raw numbers.

Young,vever married, childless women earn more that young never married men.  Women who work between 5 and 39 hrs/week earn more that men who work between 5 and 39 hours/wk.

May I propose a Swiftian solution and say that we should cut these women's pay so they can be equal to men? We want to be "fair" and live in a nation that is "equal."

 

Quantcast