Equal pay

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.