By Selwyn Duke
What do you call a man who sermonizes about the evils
of paying women less than men but allows that very practice in his own
office? While a certain unflattering
noun would leap to the minds of most, we can now apply a proper one: Barack
Obama.
Although the Illinois senator has vowed to make pay
equity between the sexes a priority in his administration, it has been revealed
that he doesn’t practice what he preaches. Writes CNSNEWS.com:
“On average, women working in Obama’s Senate office
were paid at least $6,000 below the average man working for the Illinois
senator . . . . Of the five people in
Obama’s Senate office who were paid $100,000 or more on an annual basis, only
one – Obama’s administrative manager – was a woman.”
Now, some might call Obama a hypocrite. Isn’t he guilty of the very invidious
discrimination he claims plagues America? It’s certainly easy to take this tack, and many on my side will have a
field day doing so. Yet, such an
analysis only qualifies us for a job such as, well, working in a leftist
senator’s office. Let’s look a little
deeper.
Treating this topic recently, I cited member of the
fairer sex Carrie Lukas, who wrote:
All the relevant factors that affect pay – occupation,
experience, seniority, education and hours worked – are ignored [by those
citing the wage gap]. This sound-bite statistic fails to take into account the
different roles that work tends to play in men’s and women’s lives.
In truth, I’m the cause of the wage gap – I and hundreds of
thousands of women like me. I have a good education and have worked full time
for 10 years. Yet throughout my career, I’ve made things other than money a
priority. I chose to work in the nonprofit world because I find it fulfilling.
I sought out a specialty and employer that seemed best suited to balancing my
work and family life. When I had my daughter, I took time off and then opted to
stay home full time and telecommute. I’m not making as much money as I could,
but I’m compensated by having the best working arrangement I could hope for.
Women make similar trade-offs all the time. Surveys have
shown for years that women tend to place a higher priority on flexibility and
personal fulfillment than do men, who focus more on pay. Women tend to avoid
jobs that require travel or relocation, and they take more time off and spend
fewer hours in the office than men do.
I then added:
To expand on this, women are more likely to
decline promotions citing familial responsibilities; tend to gravitate toward
lower-paying fields (e.g., favoring social sciences over hard ones); and,
according to US Census Bureau statistics, full-time men average 2,213 working
hours a year versus only 1,796 for "full-time" women. Thus, the same
data telling us women earn less than men also explains why.
So it’s entirely possible that Senator Obama is a
sexist, misogynistic creep who gleefully rubs his hands together and laughs
demonically while scheming to persecute his female employees. Maybe he has nothing better to do. But far more likely is that the
aforementioned factors explain his office’s inter-sex pay differential. Perhaps his male employees work more hours,
have been more likely to accept promotions involving greater responsibility,
have more experience, sacrificed “personal fulfillment” and instead chose more
lucrative fields, and/or have greater seniority. Whatever the reasons, I’m quite sure of one
thing: The phenomenon is attributable to natural, market-based factors and not
a conscious desire to disenfranchise women.
Of course, I could nonetheless level charges of
invidious discrimination in an effort to score political points – just as the
senator has done. Instead, though, I
will extend him a fairness that he denies to the millions of American businessmen
he demonizes
through implication. That is the right
thing to do, Mr. Obama.
Ironically, fairness is what leftists claim to want to
achieve when issuing their feminist, 77-cents-on-a-dollar rallying cry. Yet this is an often ambiguous concept. “OK, Duke,” you say, “you want
specificity? How about equal pay for
equal work?” Well, that’s an interesting
concept.
I once read that female fashion models earn three
times as much as their male peers. Then,
it’s well-known that heavyweight boxers make more than lightweights. Would you support government intervention to
ensure pay equity among fashion models and boxers? I mean, as for the latter, lightweights have
to train as hard and also endure ruinous blows.
Of course, you might point out that to succeed in the
lightweight division, you only have to beat lightweights, but to keep your
teeth in the heavyweight division, you have to beat heavyweights, a more
difficult task. So it’s fair, isn’t it?
I agree, but often fairness is reckoned very
differently when the lower-paid group has been assigned victim status. For instance, in tennis, there long was talk
about the “grave injustice” of offering female players less prize money at
Grand Slam events. Yet it’s the same as
in boxing. Whether or not the women
train as hard, the fact remains that to succeed in women’s tennis, they only
have to vanquish women, not the far stiffer competition on the men’s tour. Thus, in either sport, it’s ridiculous to
rally for equal pay based on an equality argument because the systems are
inherently unequal, in that both lightweight boxers and female tennis players
are offered an arena in which to compete that excludes the best
competition. Yet the competitors do have
recourse. If lightweights want the glory
and purses of the heavyweights, they can move up into that division. Likewise, if the women want the men’s money,
they should play on the men’s tour.
Yet this doesn’t explain the discrimination against
male fashion models in an industry where all and sundry compete in the same
arena. They all do “equal work,” don’t
they? Perhaps, and this is the problem
with advocating social engineering in the name of fairness.
What we earn has nothing to do with idealistic notions
of fairness but is determined by the value the market – our fellow citizens, in
other words – assigns to our labors. Is
it fair that rap thugs and sports stars earn more than doctors and
teachers? Is it fair that mainstream
media propagandists who peddle the wage-gap myth earn more than an
alternative-media journalist who tries to debunk it (well, that’s not fair!)? Not just female fashion models but also heavyweight boxers and male
tennis players earn more money for one reason, and one reason only. It has nothing to do with performing more
arduous work but because the market values them more highly.
At the end of the day, the only question is who will
determine wages and on what basis? Should it be 300 million citizens or a small number of politicians and
bureaucrats, a market democracy or market autocracy? In other words, all of us, every day –
through what we buy, watch and show interest in – essentially “vote” on what
will get produced, how much people get paid, etc. Are we fair? Again, fairness is a hard thing to reckon. I can’t boast about our embrace of shock
jocks and reality television, but I will use a variation on a famous Winston
Churchill line: Market democracy is the worst system in the world . . . except
for all the rest. I’ll take the “unfairness”
of the market over that of pseudo-elite politicians any day. Now let’s contrast these two models.
Actually, the market does in fact discriminate. It compensates those who work longer hours, accept
greater responsibility and risk, and prevail over stiffer competition more than
those who don’t, for instance. (This is
why I used the modifier “invidious,” meaning “likely to create ill will,”
earlier in this piece – not all discrimination is created equal.) And, as I illustrated, certain groups benefit
from this moral discrimination, such as heavyweight boxers and men. Then there are groups privileged simply
because of what they are, such as female fashion models (however, “what they
are” makes their employers more money). Now, I ask again, should the government intervene on behalf of
lightweight boxers and/or male fashion models?
Regardless of your answer, a Big Brother market
autocracy won’t. What it will do is
train its sights on only politically-incorrect targets, such as men. Thus, in the name of eliminating
discrimination, statists are creating second-class groups which are told that
they alone may not enjoy compensation commensurate with the market’s assessment
of their worth, simply because it’s fashionable to discriminate against them. You see, when jockeying for votes by playing
group politics, some groups must be cast as villains. And guess what, men, you’re one of them.
Now that’s what I call invidious.
Not surprisingly, this social engineering is already
having an effect. In this article,
writer Carey Roberts explains:
Female physicists are getting $6,500 more [than men]. Co-eds
who majored in petroleum engineering are being offered $4,400 more. And women
computer programmers are being enticed with $7,200 extra pay. In fact for
dozens of majors and occupations, women coming out of college are getting
better offers than men . . . .
Why these disparities? Because in traditionally
male-dominated professions, employers are willing to ante up more greenbacks to
attract females in order to forestall a costly discrimination lawsuit.
And this is just the beginning. The left will never acknowledge that men earn
more due to legitimate market forces, and since trumping those forces isn’t
easy, expect more government action to achieve “fairness.” I wrote about this in my piece,
the one I cited earlier:
. . . we can see a glimpse of the future in
Norway, a land synonymous with über-feminism. In 2002, the nation embraced
affirmative action on steroids, mandating that 40 percent of corporate
boardroom members must be female. Since only seven percent were prior to this
social engineering, just imagine how many highly qualified men are now denied
jobs in the name of complying with this quota.
The implications of such government
meddling are more profound than you may think, in that it harms women and
children as well. As I went on to
explain:
. . . as we force employers to deny
positions, promotions and pay raises to qualified men in order to satisfy
social engineers, many men will no longer be able to fulfill their obligation
to put bread on the table. And this hurts the traditional family, forcing women
out of the home to compensate for their now financially handicapped husbands
and relegating children to day-care centers . . . . [And] It means, ladies, that your husbands,
brothers and sons will find it increasingly difficult to get a fair shake in
this Norway-quota brave new world.
So we can choose the discrimination
of the market’s meritocracy or that of the statists’ bureaucracy. I, for one, will settle on the people’s
determinations every time.
I say this even if they do
sometimes give us things such as rap thugs, reality television, and Barack
Obama.
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