TORONTO (CP) WOMEN WHO WANT TO EARN AS MUCH AS MEN should stay single, says a new study released by the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute.
Single working women in Canada are paid, on the average, 99.2 percent of the salaries of their unmarried male counterparts, says the study released this week from the institute, a research organization that promotes the idea that the market should function freely.
Michael Walker, director of the institute, said “marital status is perhaps the most important explanation of male-female income differential.”
“The salaries of never-married people are identical, regardless of sex,” he said. This led the Institute to the conclusion that affirmative-action programs are misguided. In fact, the Institute says, laws and regulations designed to protect minority groups and women from discrimination actually hurt more than they help.
“Affirmative action programs harm highly competent minority persons by making it appear that their accomplishments are not due to their own efforts but to government largesse,” the study says.
“They harm unqualified minority persons by placing them in positions that expose their incompetence, they harm minority persons excluded by increasing their frustration and lowering their motivation to attain job qualifications on their own. In addition affirmative action exacerbates racial and other inter-minority group animosity.”
Walter Block, senior economist of the Institute who wrote the chapter on working women, said “Canadian women who have never been married have indeed ‘come a long way baby’ toward earnings equality with men.”
Block said his research results “are truly staggering.” “Never-married females in Canada earned $4,169.72 in 1971, while their male counterparts registered earnings of $4,201.24. The differential by sex for those who have never been married amounted to only $31.52 for an entire year—this translates into a female-to-male ratio of 99.2 percent.”
Block said “we will have to wait several years for the results of the 1981 census to see whether or not this tendency persists.”
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Brockville Recorder and Times (Brockville, Ontario), January 30, 1982.