The old Ms. magazine, “I am Woman” notion of ‘comparable worth’ is stirring from its grave — an unintended consequence of the John Roberts nomination to the Supreme Court.

Reagan administration official Linda Chavez, in an editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal ($?), reminds us what the comparable worth movement was:

Comparable worth was intended to eliminate the gap between the earnings of men and women. Feminists argued that only hidden discrimination could explain the relatively lower wages in female-dominated occupations, like librarians, compared to male-dominated jobs, like electricians. Under comparable worth, employers would be required to rate jobs according to abstract notions of intrinsic value based on years of education required for a given job, the level of responsibility it entailed, and working conditions involved.

Note the absence of market mechanisms! Amy Ridenour explains the consequences:

Comparable worth, simply put, was nothing less than an attempt to use the pretext of equal rights for women as a means of putting judges, bureaucrats, legislators and trial lawyers in charge of private and public sector wage rates.

Equal rights means equal rights, not guaranteed equal outcomes.

Comparable worth made real inroads in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. California was ready to require equal pay for state jobs deemed to have comparable worth.

John Roberts recognized the implications as a young Reagan administration attorney. In 1983 he wrote that the proposed California legislation was a “staggeringly pernicious law codifying the anti-capitalist notion of ‘comparable worth,’ (as opposed to market value) pay .”

This bit of history has given big media outlets something to write about in the mid-August doldrums: he’s anti-woman! But there’s more to this than the media piling on to the nominee.

While the comparable worth movement died in Congress and in the courts during the 1980’s, it has a successor: “pay equity.”

Pay equity is most publicized in the abuse of statistics such as “women earn 80¢ for every dollar men make.” The Los Angeles Times was guilty of this in a March editorial. You can see fount of the disinformation at the National Organization for Women’s site here.*

Today’s “pay equity” movement is “comparable worth” in a new guise.

It’s also equally flawed. In response to the LA Times piece, we wrote:

Among the professions where these disparities are supposed to exist are elementary school teachers, where the female average pay is 85% of the male; lawyers (73%); and bus drivers (75%).

These figures can be both accurate and completely unsupportive of the conclusion “women earn less than men even when performing the same job.” These are averages: all male lawyer income divided by the number of male lawyers, etc. They do not take into account years spent working; the “same job” element at the very heart of the unequal pay claim is missing.

Does anyone really believe that gender affects pay for heavily unionized elementary school teachers or bus drivers? Pay in those occupations is strictly a function of seniority. The same is true of law — associates are compensated based on years since law school. Partners are compensated differently, but according to a formula agreed to by the partnership. Attorney compensation by firm and seniority is semi-public and a topic of constant discussion in the profession. Would any firm risk the black eye it would get if it discriminated in pay?

The claim simply fails the test of common sense.

So how can the numbers be right? If female teachers, lawyers, and bus drivers take time off to have and raise kids, on average the group will always have less years working than males, and will be paid less. If a forty-five year old female teacher has worked for fifteen years while a forty-five year old male colleague has worked twenty-three, she will be paid less. If older female attorneys are more likely to choose a non-partner track that does not demand eighty hour weeks, they will be paid less. If female bus drivers work only local routes to be near home while men take longer, overnight runs, they will be paid less.

So the real difference between the sexes is that women are more likely to make these choices than men — not that they are paid differently for exactly the same work. Whether they should have to make those choices is valid ground for debate — but the ‘unequal pay’ myth is a irrelevant sideshow.

On top of that, paying a comparably qualified and experienced woman less than a man for the same job would be per se illegal.

But this notion of disparate pay is carefully tended, so that should the political winds change, legislative and legal “remedies” can be created.

Crazy?

An organization called the National Committee for Pay Equity advocates amending the Fair Labor Standards Act to prohibit pay discrimination “among workers performing dissimilar work in equivalent jobs.” How will that be determined? Oh, here it is: “enforcement of The Fair Pay Act is complaint-driven.” (Score one for the lawyers!). And employers will have to report “compensation statistics by job type, gender, race, and national origin.”**

What is the difference between this notion of “equivalent jobs” and the comparable worth movement’s “intrinsic value?” Both seem to require bureaucrats, not markets, to make determinations about wages and salaries. Our answer: there is no effective difference.

Comparable worth has rebranded itself and is still out there, biding its time.

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*This is the first time in many years we’ve seen someone still advocating passage of the Equal Rights Amendment … another notion from the 1970’s. I wanted to find a Helen Reddy album.

** It’s interesting that in a time when HotJobs, Monster, et al are passe, they still make the claim “employees often lack even the most basic information about overall compensation practices. Without this information, workers cannot fairly compare and evaluate present and prospective employers, thus artificially constraining their employment choices.”

Technorati Tags: John Roberts, comparable worth, pay equity, Supreme Court

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 24th, 2005 at 4:17 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Los Angeles Times, I knew I'd use my Econ major, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.