What Congress doesn’t do is as important as what it does. That’s why it is good that Senate Republicans blocked the “Paycheck Fairness Act.”
The bill supposedly was meant to remedy wage discrimination against women. But it would have placed on employers the burden of proving that a wage gap between a man and a woman was not based on sex but on qualifications, experience, etc.
That is upside-down. It should be the job of the accuser to prove that discrimination occurred, not of the employer to prove that it didn’t.
President Barack Obama says, “[W]omen make only 77 cents for every dollar that men earn.” He suggests that proves discrimination. But it doesn’t.
In 2009, the U.S. Department of Labor examined a range of studies on wage gaps between men and women. The department “concluded that discrimination’s role in creating the pay gap may be practically nonexistent,” noted Andrew Biggs, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He added, “[T]he 23 percent gender pay gap shrinks significantly – and perhaps disappears altogether – when one accounts for various differences between men and women.”
For one thing, women who are married with children are more apt to pick careers that take child-care responsibilities into account. A higher proportion of women work in the lower-paying nonprofit sector, for instance, because its working conditions are more flexible. Women also work part time more often than men do and are more apt to exit the work force at least for a time to care for children. That reduces seniority and experience, affecting wages.
Men often enter more physically risky jobs that pay more. And men lean toward jobs with higher pay but fewer benefits, whereas women often prefer better benefits.
Lots of factors go into a company’s setting of pay scales. Government is not competent to account for all those factors, so it should not use intrusive laws to, in effect, set wages.