Today I got an email from the White House asking "Do
you support equal pay for women?" A
loaded question because if I answer no, I'm a male chauvinist, or whatever we
call them these days. But, from my
perspective, if I answer yes, I'm saying that simply because a person is a
woman, they should get pay equal to a man, and I don't believe that either. I DO believe in equal pay for equal work, and
I don't even need to take into account a person's sex to make that
statement. The problem that I have with
"equal pay for women" is that it gets translated into an equal
paycheck with less than equal work, at least sometimes.
I'm not saying that this is always the case, and I don't
really know that there isn't some kind of discrimination against women in the
workplace. I can only speak from
personal experience, and my experience is that companies do, at least
sometimes, pay women more simply because they are women.
The example that I'm going to give here is actually from
back in the early 90s. I worked in a machine
shop that would hire groups of people, and give them a choice as to which jobs
they would prefer to have. Some of the
jobs were a little more difficult than others, but one of the main differences
between jobs was how dirty the job was.
The dirtiest jobs got paid the highest pay. And for the most part, most people would have
just picked the easiest and cleanest job if the pay was the same. I know I would have. But, I picked the dirtiest, hardest job
because the pay was higher. And, women
tended to pick the cleaner, easier jobs.
Not all women did, though, and the women that did pick the dirty, hard
jobs got paid the same as every man on the floor.
After a few years, some of the women got involved in a law
suit against the company, saying that they were being discriminated against
because they were women. Because most of
the women worked at the lower paying jobs (which they picked), the company
responded by making the pay scale the same for all of the machine operator
jobs. Problem solved, I guess. Except that then I couldn't transfer to one
of the equal paying better jobs.
It is truly a shame that discrimination occurs with the
frequency that it does in the work place, and I'm all for trying to eliminate that
discrimination; I just don't think it's even possible. People discriminate, whether intentionally or
unintentionally. Someone will always be
treated less fairly than others.
Sometimes those people that are being treated less fairly are going to
be women.
