AT THE RISK OF BECOMING TIRESOME, I SIMPLY HAVE TO RESPOND once more to Walter Block. To recap for those who are not regular readers, Block wrote a piece in The Financial Post on March 9, in which he stated that the wage gap between men and women, most often described by saying that women earn only 64 percent of what men earn, is a myth.
I wrote in response on March 15, that the gap was no myth and that I was unimpressed by Block’s statistics. I further suggested that there was a significant economic penalty incurred by women who marry and become charged with primary family responsibility for child raising.
One possible (and only partial) solution to the problem would be freely accessibly day care for women who choose to (or must) work where the man of the family (if any) is unwilling to shoulder an equal part of the child-rearing burden. Indeed, Block seemed to suggest that child rearing is an “alternative pursuit,” perhaps akin to golfing seven days a week.
Block then offered a rebuttal argument on March 28. (I would have responded to him earlier but I was enjoying the pleasures of Venice and conducting my semiannual survey of London casinos. It remains easier to win in London than in Las Vegas, but Block would undoubtedly challenge my “economic methodology.”)
Block offered two sets of numbers.
He stated that in at least one set of statistics, it has been shown that never-married women over 30 with university degrees had an earnings ratio vis-à-vis men of 109.8 percent. He does not seriously attempt to refute my original assertion that this figure is not significant because the group is so insignificant in terms of the entire work force.
Block seemed to rely on a second statistic, namely that never-married women earn 93.4 percent of the wages of never-married men and the women in this category are 26.2 percent of the female work force. I wonder how many men would be prepared to work for 93.4 percent of what their peers earn?
But given that Block and I agree that the main problem stems from the economic impact of marriage on women, I find it passing strange that he doesn’t give any statistics on the wage gap between married women (presumably 73.8 percent of the women in the work force) and married men. I suspect that the reason is that if he gave these statistics, the wage gap would be 64 percent. And in my book, this makes the statistic far from mythical.
If I read Block correctly, he accepted that the gap is real, not mythical. But he offered only negatives in terms of solutions. He rejected pay equity. He rejected improved public child care facilities. And he rejected the new trend in divorce laws and property settlements.
He blamed instead “unwise tax, education, and welfare policies,” and would improve the situation by “rescinding” them. What (if anything) they would be replaced by he didn’t say. Perhaps he would ban marriage and child rearing, since these seem to be the root of the wage gap.
Or he might just want to be a little more up front and say that he believes that married women should not work outside the home. After all, if we passed a law excluding them from the work force, the wage gap would be decidedly narrowed and the unemployment rate would presumably plummet—providing you could get men to take on the low-paying jobs women now tend to hold.
There’s an old adage that suggests that if something isn’t broken, don’t fix it. But insofar as economic equality for (at least) married women is concerned, something certainly is broken. Maybe pay equity and increased public facilities for child care won’t solve the problem. But Block’s statistics demonstrate that there is a problem and it is not mythical.
Almost every working woman in the country is aware that they are second-class citizens when it comes to lifetime’s economic endeavors, even if it is (as Block would probably say) because they devote too much time to home and family and don’t have the single-mindedness of males who can’t get pregnant and who generally reject the role of even part-time “house husband,” a pejorative term if ever I heard one.
There is a gap and an inequality here. Working women know it even if working economists do not. The challenge is to do something about it.
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Arthur Drache, The Financial Post (Ontario, Canada), April 11, 1989.