Don Singleton: Comporable Worth

Saturday, August 27, 2005

Comporable Worth

Linda Chaves wrote in OpinionJournal Liberals pillory John Roberts for having opposed a silly idea. - Two decades have passed since feminists lost their battle for "comparable worth," a bureaucratic scheme that would have replaced the free market in determining wages. But recent headlines on the John Roberts nomination make it seem like the mid-1980s all over again.... At issue were comments in a memo Mr. Roberts wrote while a young White House lawyer in 1984. Asked to recommend whether the Reagan administration should remain neutral on comparable worth, he called the idea "staggeringly pernicious" and "anti-capitalist." He was right. Nonetheless, comparable worth, repudiated by policy makers and courts 20 years ago, has been revived as a stick with which to beat a seemingly invincible nominee.

The Left has to have something to beat him with

Comparable worth is no mere variant of equal pay for equal work, which has been the law since 1963. It is illegal for an employer to pay a woman less than a man to trim a tree or to hire a male day-care worker at a higher salary than a female; it is also illegal to bar women from tree-trimming or men from day-care work. Yet for complex social and historical reasons, men and women still tend to do different jobs, although this is less true today than it was in the mid-'80s. In 1983, fewer than 6% of employed engineers were women; by the late '90s, that number had almost doubled to 11%, still far short of parity. The "remedy" is not to pay less for jobs that are dominated by men but to encourage more women to become electricians or tree-trimmers. This was the conclusion of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights after extensive research and public hearings in 1985 when I directed the agency. We opposed comparable-worth legislation and lawsuits, arguing that such efforts would actually discourage women from breaking out of sex-stereotyped roles and undermine the free market system.