THE FEMINIST MOVE FOR EQUAL PAY IS DEAD FROM THE NECK up. To be sure, legislatures are even now enacting this idea into law. But as the evidence continues to pile up, its intellectual foundation is crumbling.
The first nail in the coffin is that there is no wage gap between males and females. That ballyhooed statistic that says women’s pay is only 64 percent of men’s stems almost entirely from the asymmetrical effects of marital status. Marriage enhances the husband’s income and reduces that of the wife.
When the incomes of people who have never been married are compared, the gap disappears. Fraser Institute research, based on StatsCan data, shows that at the last Canadian census, the earnings of never-married women were 93.4 percent of never-married men.
In the previous census, the female-male income ratio for 30-and-over never-marrieds was 99.2 percent; and in that year, the ratio rose to 109.8 percent for those with a university degree who were never married. That is, the average salary of females was 9.8 percentage points more than that of males.
The second nail emerges when we consider the exotic implications of the employer discrimination hypothesis of the pay gap. If this analysis were true, one would expect to find a systematic and positive relationship between profit levels and the number of women in the firm or industry.
The mythical “sexist pig” employer would soon go the way of the dodo, courtesy of market forces. If he were stupid enough to hire a male when he could have employed an equally productive female for less money (because of the pay “gap”), his gender-blind competitors would hire her, and price him out of business.
If market justice compels equal pay for equally productive workers in any case, what, then, is the effect of mandating this situation by law? The answer, in a word, is chaos.
Feminists are urging a wage-control system upon us that will award points—and thus higher salaries—to skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions.
These are all supply-side considerations. But the crucial determinant of the value of labor is demand for the product. The skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions of the horse breaker changed not one whit when Henry Ford brought his “horseless carriage” to market. But because people demanded cars instead of horses, the salary of the horse trainer plummeted. According to feminist proposals, his compensation would have remained the same.
When programs incorporating these criteria have been implemented, the results have proved embarrassing. In Minnesota, a chemist, social worker, and nurse are all rated equally at 238 points, but in Iowa, the nurse is elevated to 248, the social worker falls to 192, and the chemist plummets to 173.
Instead of barking up the wrong tree with equal pay, feminists should be using their power and prestige to address our inequitable divorce laws. According to Lenore Weitzman, author of The Divorce Revolution, divorced women and their children suffer a 73 percent decrease in their standard of living, while their ex-husbands register a 42 percent increase in theirs. Female poverty is to a great degree a function of single motherhood.
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The Financial Post (Ontario, Canada), Thursday, March 9, 1989.