I still don’t get it. Is your concern that if the bill is implemented immediately employers would be forced to pay less-skilled women an equal amount for the same job as more-skilled men?

If that’s the case, the delay still doesn’t make skill investment the more rational choice – a woman who saw that the bill was coming in 4 years, would realize that in four years, she’ll get equal pay for X job if she meets the minimum skill requirements: so meeting the bare minimum would mean the highest payoff for lowest investment.

Or is the idea that the delay will motivate enough women to be skilled that there will be a big enough pool for employers to not hire (or pay less) less-skilled women, and still not be charged with discrimination, because they’ll be able to give preference to skilled women instead?

In that case, your delay would lead to something similar to the prisoner’s dillema (if we’re still talking about idealized rational actors) – if all women don’t invest in skills, they get the best scenario (high pay for low investment), but if some don’t invest while others do, the non-investers are hosed (not getting hired/low pay), while the investors get the second best outcome (high pay for high investment), and if all women invest, they all get the second to worst outcome (competition lowers pay and raises investment for all hired).

Fabulous idea!

oh and derek you are a poopy head. :D

Obviously, Bush has never been prone to mischaracterizing government studies, government statistics, or government intelligence, so I’m sure he has a valid and well founded reason for oppossing the bill.

ilyka: How much money would you spend on an education that would earn you $40,000 a year? Would you spend more on an education that would earn you $50,000 a year? A rational actor will always invest more when the payout is expected to be higher. Men expect to make more money than women, so they invest more in their careers. Forgive me for assuming that different results lead to different incentives.

Mnemosyne: Did I say that no one pays different amounts? No. I simply stated that in many businesses it is extremely difficult to do so. Your friend at Continental’s experience is exactly my point. The problem is often that women are denied the opportunity for better work, which is different from “equal pay for equal work.”

And finally, if any of your are enterprising enough, why don’t you just start opening up businesses and offer women 95% of what men would be making. You’ll instantly pull women away from other companies, depriving them of cheap labor, all the while keeping your costs lower than the companies who are now only able to employ the more expensive men.

I think this legislation will make things MORE difficult for women not less. It opens up room for lawsuits, hey, if you take 6 months off for maternity leave–for two or three kids, and your male coworker doesn’t and he *justifiably* gets more money, you might sue…

What you’re left with is either no maternity OR a corporate culture that doesn’t want to hire women.

What I was getting at though was in the MSM, in the comments sections of feminist blogs and many other places, the 77 cents on the dollar stat is indeed promoted as being fully “77 cents on the dollar for the same job”, this is simply not the case, the gov’t numbers behind the 77 cents clearly state this isnt the case, its an average versus an average and its from 2004 at that. If we look at subsets of the general population we will see the numbers fluctuate, as with the 63 cents on a dollar for minority women on average but that number isnt as bad if minority women are compared to minority men, especially if you look under 34. In no way am i claiming wage discrimination doesnt exist, I know it does from studies and from anecdata but the 77 cents on the dollar stat is misued entirely too often by well-meaning people, I can only guess its because it fits into a larger narrative and sounds good, I’m not sure.

It bothers me though that posters on blogs or in other places dont correct people who think about the 77 cents on the dollar stat incorrectly or use it to represent something it doesnt when that kind of thing wouldnt stand with other numbers/reports. At the end of the day, its an average vs. an average, the reasons why the womens and mens incomes are different are legion and they are fascinating and represent many facets of the patriarchy but one shouldnt say it means women make 77% in the exact same job, with the same experience, work history, etc, it doesnt, that women could be suffering from wage discrimination but it wouldnt necesarily be 77%.

danakitty- one problem with the same jobs thing is the experience bit. for many reasons, some personal choice, some institutionalized to hurt women, on average a woman at say 35 will have less years/months of experience in her job than a man, so in that case, its the “same” job and they are performing equally well but the man is making more for having been fucked over by his gender straitjacket and not being able/feeling he can ever miss work, that is changing thankfully and the feminist movement has a huge hand in that but its not so simple. if you wish check the very report the 77 cents on the dollar comes from and look at what they say about men and women and work experience in the same position, its a fascinating read overall and worth taking the time. in my mind it deflates the argument of “same job” a little but strengthens the case for how we are fucking everyone over with our current system.

How about college-educated women? Their starting pay is about 80 percent of their male colleagues (tailoring off to 69 percent a mere ten years later). Some of the difference does correspond to the fact that women are less likely than men to ask for higher pay. But here’s the rub: research shows that when women do ask for a raise, they’re likely to be punished for it. As Hannah Riley Bowles from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government put it, “What we found across all the studies is men were always less willing to work with a woman who had attempted to negotiate than with a woman who did not.”

And that’s not the main problem with the “women don’t ask” theory. In most jobs, women have no right whatsoever to negotiate over pay. They may also have no right to know what anyone else is making. From car dealerships to retail stores, law offices to telecommunication firms, employees are required to sign a statement acknowledging that “discussing salary with colleagues” is a “fire-able offense.” In some cases, these provisions are a cover so women won’t know they’re making less than their male colleagues.

And I like this part, simply because it shuts down people who say that women do different work…

Even within the same jobs, men and women don’t earn the same rate. But mostly, men and women still do different jobs – and women’s jobs pay less simply because women perform them.

Is it all accounted for by time taken off from childbirth? No. But what about accounting for hours worked? Men work more hours on average and are more likely to pull overtime. What percentage of women are only working part time? It’s more than men.

We already know independently that 75% of the pay gap is explainable by non-discriminatory factors.* That means that –of the 23% gap, only 25% is even possible discriminatory related–. So of the total paygap, only possibly 5.75% is related to discrimination. Not quite the crisis it’s made out to be.

*Source: American Association of Academic Women Educational Foundation report of 2007.