Equal pay laws that apply to state and local governments would be extended to private contractors doing business with the state, under a proposal outlined Monday by leaders of womens advocacy groups.<\/p>\n
After years of efforts under gender equity laws, or “comparable worth” initiatives, women in state and local government now earn 97 cents for every dollar men make, said Patty Tanji, president of the Pay Equity Coalition of Minnesota.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, in the overall workforce, the gender gap lags behind at about 75 cents for women, Tanji said. While the proposal would apply to only the 1,800 companies that do business with the state, “its a step in the right direction,” she said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It absolutely infuriates me that the press still repeats that soggy old statistic verbatim, when commanded to, by whatever special interest wants to wave it around. Women at large <\/em>make less money, because they traditionally tend to get less education, go into lower-paying fields (the standard gender cliches would be social work versus engineering), and – the big clinker – tend to take years off from their careers to have and raise children. This slows promotions and raises – and, according at least to Warren Farrell, lengthens their lives, but we digress.<\/p>\nWho should <\/em>get more money for a job<\/em> in a fair world, all other things being equal – someone who’s been on the job for ten years without a break, or someone who took a couple of years off in the middle of those ten years to have and raise kids?<\/p>\nNote that I was gender-neutral, there; what if the woman worked for ten years straight, and the guy stayed home for two years? Is there any rational reason the guy should earn the same money as the woman?<\/p>\n
Why?<\/p>\n
A spokesman for the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce said pay equity mandates are unnecessary. Tom Hesse said studies have shown that the gender gap in pay is due mostly to factors not related to discrimination.<\/p>\n
“When you take into consideration the difference in occupations that men and women choose, and length of time on the job, there really is no wage gap,” he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Which is, in fact, the truth.<\/p>\n
Which makes sense when you realize that this really isn’t about equal pay for anyone.<\/p>\n
The pay equity proposal was one of more than a dozen being supported by leaders of womens groups at the State Capitol on Monday.<\/p>\n
Dubbing their effort “Presidents on Presidents Day,” the presidents or top officials of more than 22 womens groups said they are coalescing at the Legislature [while I’ve said a lot of bad things about politicians, even I don’t believe\u00a0 they’ve done anything to deserve that – Ed.<\/em><\/font>] to push for: increasing womens pay and workforce flexibility, providing health insurance to an estimated 343,000 uncovered Minnesotans, reducing violence against women, and providing improved health care and more affordable birth control and family planning services.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nIt’s about feminizing poverty and collecting a lot of markers from the DFL.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As it happens, I’ve worked in a number of fields where women tend to earn more than men. I spent five years as a technical writer – a field that had been dominated by women (since it started as a “promotion” from secretarial work, back in the 1940’s). Traditionally, women out-earned and out-ranked men in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-democrats","category-men-and-women"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}