The past couple of weeks have seen a lot of statistics being thrown about regarding women’s pay. The allegation, of course, is that women make only a fraction of what men make for doing the same job. Based on data compiled by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, some of Connecticut’s top female leaders came out thundering against alleged gender inequity.
There was Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz side-by-side with Teresa Younger, the executive director of the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women, State Sen. Edith Prague, and Rosemary Dempsey, executive director of the Connecticut chapter of NOW, all urging state businesses to review their practices to ensure that women and men are being fairly compensated.
What brought these four together was National Equal Pay Day, a made-up milestone designed primarily as a public relations ploy to agitate for something which largely doesn’t exist.
The press conference of this quartet was based primarily on the statistical reporting done by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. That organization says that, nationally, women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. In Connecticut, the group claims the situation is even worse — that, here, the number is 71 cents, putting the Nutmeg State in the bottom third of all the states.
Bysiewicz is posting a message to businesses on the Secretary of the State’s CONCORD application site, which receives more than 700,000 visits each month, urging businesses to review hiring and payroll practices and make sure all policies are compliant with the Equal Pay Act of 1963. “Connecticut women are being underpaid and undervalued,” she said.
What the research doesn’t say, though, is that a woman, with comparable education and skills to a man, and with comparable commitment to the job as a man, earns less than a man for the same job.
No, the research makes broad statements, coming to broad conclusions, not specific statements about specific problems. That women in the workplace are more likely to drop out of the career track for several years because of family issues, or more likely to seek part-time employment or job-sharing arrangements, all of which serves to keep overall pay levels down for women in comparison to men in similar careers, gets little play in the hullabaloo over the supposed discrimination.
This is, of course, a long-standing problem. Years ago, when similar claims were being bandied about, one local employer dismissed the idea with a singular statement: “If we could hire equally-qualified female employees for only three-quarters of what a man costs, don’t you think we’d be filling every job opening with a woman?”
Interestingly, while Bysiewicz and her colleagues were using the institute’s data to bash Connecticut employers, they all but ignored another key finding from the same organization. That is, in another report issued last December, the institute said that Connecticut ranked number six in the nation for states with the best economies for women. Connecticut ranked in the top third for overall employment and earnings opportunities for women, and also for actual earnings, putting the state in the top five for median salaries of women.
None of this deterred the Secretary of the State, the head of the state chapter of the National Organization for Women, nor the head of the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women from boldly asserting that Connecticut stinks when it comes to women’s pay. But their wishful thinking does not excuse them from ignoring contradictory evidence from the same research factory that they’re using to malign local employers.
