“The bad news for professional feminists is that the good news is multiplying,” George Will writes in Newsweek. It is now “ludicrous” to regard women as victims in a “patriarchal, phallocentric America.”
Quoting the Hudson Institute’s Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the Labor Department, Will notes that even though women are receiving more college degrees and unemployment is lower for women, the feminist lobbyists try to convince Congress that women are victims. The so-called Paycheck Fairness Act is one of their favorite causes.
Will writes:
The president wants Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. It would further enrich a Democratic constituency-trial lawyers-by saying that differences in pay between men and women cannot be based on differences of education, training, and experience unless there is a “business necessity”-an invitation to litigation.
Valerie Jarrett, a senior Obama adviser, says: In 1963, when the first “equal pay” law was enacted, “women earned 59 cents for every dollar earned by a man,” and “nearly 50 years later, the wage gap has narrowed by only 18 cents,” so “women are still paid only 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man-and are paid less than men even when they have similar levels of experience and education.”
Well. Women were 49.7 percent of the workforce in August. Because the economic slump hit construction and manufacturing harder than government and health care, which employ more women, by November women may be, for the first time, a majority of workers. In this year’s second quarter, women earned 82.8 percent of the median weekly wage of men. Last year single women working full time earned 95 percent of what men earned. Young, unmarried, and childless urban women earn 8 percent more than similarly situated males. Why? See above: College degrees.
Yep, the Paycheck Fairness Act is absurd because women are doing as well or better than men. This is good news for most women. But not for the apparatus set up to get more goodies, supposedly for “women” in the abstract, but really for really for themselves.
This is what happens when government sets out to remedy some ill of society and doesn’t put an expiration date on its efforts.