Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) repealed Wisconsin’s equal pay law last week, which will make it harder for victims of wage discrimination to sue for lost earnings and back wages.
State Sen. Glenn Grothman (R) led the effort to repeal the law because of his belief that pay discrimination is a myth driven by liberal women’s groups, saying: “Money is more important for men.”
The Daily Beast reports:
Whatever gaps exist, he insists, stem from women’s decision to prioritize childrearing over their careers. “Take a hypothetical husband and wife who are both lawyers,” he says. “But the husband is working 50 or 60 hours a week, going all out, making 200 grand a year. The woman takes time off, raises kids, is not go go go. Now they’re 50 years old. The husband is making 200 grand a year, the woman is making 40 grand a year. It wasn’t discrimination. There was a different sense of urgency in each person.”
Grothman doesn’t accept these studies. When I ran the numbers by him, he replied, “The American Association of University Women is a pretty liberal group.” Nor, he argued, does its conclusion take into account other factors, like “goals in life. You could argue that money is more important for men. I think a guy in their first job, maybe because they expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious. To attribute everything to a so-called bias in the workplace is just not true.”
While I agree that two people who start the same day and work next to each other at the same pace should be paid the same, there is a business and cultural issue here.
The business issue is one of lateral movement. Businesses like it when employees make lateral moves in a company. You hear women say something like "I worked in billing for twenty years and they turned me down for top dog in the billing department, and picked Bob who was in the billing department three years ago". The reason Bob was choosen was because he knows how the other departments operate and can be used as a substitute top dog when someone goes on vacation. Women typically do not make lateral moves.
No matter how far you think we have come, men are still stuck with working as their only legitamit course of action. Any man for any reason, who does the Mr. Mom thing is still concidered a bum. That his wife is making 20 million a year, and they want a parent to raise the kid (rather than a stranger at daycare) does not matter, he will still be concidered a bum(or gigolo if you prefer) if he does not have some independent form of income. A woman who can work but stays home is sacrificing her carreer for her family. Due to this men tend to stay at jobs longer than women and so they get higher pay for the same work , since length of employment also factors in.
This is why it is called "equal pay for equal work." Two people doing the *SAME* work should receive the same pay. Comparing an executive working 60 hours a week to an administrative assistant engaged in job sharing to raise her family is not an apples to apples comparison.