Equal Pay Day passed us by with few fireworks here in Berkeley (though lord knows our friends in Oakland got enough of those on Sunday), which surprised me because it also seemed like one of those juicy red meat... er... blue meat issues for the left. Regardless of the merits, concern over the gender pay gap ought to be entirely palatable to moderates and even right-of-center women.
But what of those pesky merits? Well, I'm of two minds.
The cold-hearted-bastard economist in me appreciated the way Reason Magazine diffused some of the alarmism of the equal pay debate. Yes, on average, a woman only makes 77¢ to the man's $1 in America. But once you actually control for equal work -- just look at the relative gender makeups of GSPP versus Haas to see why you'd need to do this -- much of the gap disappears. And apparently if you control for pregnancy and marriage as well and just compare single men and women, the disparity disappears entirely. Phew! Good thing we're such a progressive society!
That's where the liberal weenie in me kicks in. Reason's point is well-taken, but it's small comfort that the greatest impediment to equal pay is pregnancy and motherhood: something that women alone are biologically equipped and predisposed to do. Reason chickened out of its own logic early because a) they didn't think it through entirely, b) they honestly think that controlling for biology in and of itself is not stacking the deck, or c) they're too politic to say that they find the whole idea of equal pay bunk, futile, and pointless.
I imagine that the Reason editors and I would agree that extending equal pay protection to expectant and new mothers is too lofty for us. Dispersing the risks and impacts of parenthood, however, is both plausible and worthwhile. It would go a long way towards obviating the meaning of any average difference in pay. There are lots of ways to do this: guaranteed parental leave both before and after delivery with pay, reimbursements for businesses who have to hire temp workers while mothers are gone, day care vouchers, and, naturally, universal health care. While expensive, this approach to equal pay would I believe deliver considerable dividends to our society. And even if pregnancy continued to exert a singular and significant impact on pay, which I suspect it will always do, we'd at least be confident that we were compensating parents in an equally unique way.
On to the comments!
Comments
While I appreciate the concern, Im sceptical its possible to diffuse the costs of pregnancy and chilbearing. Many of the measures you mention are used in Europe -paid maternity leave ranges from 3 months in Spain to 6 in Finland!- the net result: its so expensive to hire women companies don't hire them; and if they do, its not for a position of responsibility: they take too much time off with such generous maternity benefits. In the end, maternity becomes such a big deal for everyone, that women loose even more.
Hey, I'm a parent too, so my concern isn't exactly altruistic :)
But I hear what you're saying. I guess that there are two phenomena that merit concern here: one is just the general impact of pregnancy and parenthood on both mothers and fathers, the second is the specific impact of pregnancy on female pay and career advancement. Obviously I think the former merits a lot of attention based on social equity. I don't think the latter is hopeless, though: again, maybe the answer is to pay more attention to mitigating the firm's costs than most European countries have done.