The National Committee On Pay Equity and other participants in the theatrics of Equal Pay Day will not appreciate the figures Furchtgott-Roth and Stolba marshal. The premise of Equal Pay Day is that women work from Jan. 1 until early April essentially for no pay because women earn only 74 cents for every dollar men earn. Furchtgott-Roth and Stolba argue that the 74 cents statistic is the product of faulty methodology that serves the political agenda of portraying women as victims needing yet more government intervention in the workplace. The authors demonstrate that income disparities between men and women have been closing rapidly and that sex discrimination, which has been illegal for 30 years, is a negligible cause of those that remain, which are largely the result of rational personal choices by women. Between 1960 and 1994 women's wages grew 10 times faster than men's, and today, among people 27 to 33, women who have never had a child earn about 98 cents for every dollar men earn.
Children change the earnings equations.
They are the main reason that meaningful earnings contrasts must compare men and women who have similar experience and life situations. Earnings differentials often reflect different professional paths that are cheerfully chosen because of different preferences, motivations and expectations. Eighty percent of women bear children and 25 percent of working women work part-time, often to accommodate child rearing. Still, between 1974 and 1993 women's wages have been rising relative to men's in all age groups, and most dramatically among the youngest workers. The rise would be more dramatic if many women did not make understandable decisions to favor family over higher pay and more rapid job advancement purchased by 60-hour weeks on the fast track.