IWF’s Carrie Lukas had an article over at NRO on Friday about many feminist organization’s decision to endorse the Obama/Biden ticket.  As Carrie points out, a big reason behind their endorsement is “pay equity.” This is an issue that Obama has tackled with a new ad.  Unfortunately, the issue is more complicated than Obama or the feminist establishment make it out to be:



[Obama] repeats the misleading statistic that women make “77 cents to the dollar a man makes,” and charges that McCain opposes “equal pay for women” because he doesn’t support giving the federal government the power to regulate private sector wages.
 
One might think the recent news coverage of the gender breakdown of his own staff might cause Obama to consider the problem with these statistics. An analysis of the salaries paid to Obama’s staff revealed that his female employees make just 83 cents for every dollar he pays a male staffer. In contrast, McCain’s staff includes numerous women in senior management and his female employees actually earn more than their male counterparts.
 
Does this statistics show that Obama, already suspect due to his “sweetie” and “lipstick” comments, is a closet sexist? No. Instead it reveals some of the problems with making these comparisons. The make-up of Obama’s staff tells us nothing about the pool of candidates he interviewed or the work that they perform. I’d bet that Senator Obama simply chose the best of those who applied for jobs in his office and negotiated salaries with them, and it just happened that he ended up with more highly paid men.
 
Yet if Obama recognizes the problems with the “83 cents on the dollar” statistic to assess his office, he should also recognize how misleading the feminists’ “77 cents on the dollar” statistic is to the American economy. When producing that statistic, the Department of Labor doesn’t take into account factors such as occupation, years of experience, hours worked, education, or the many other factors that we all know affect how much someone is paid. Analysis of this statistic have found that the individual decisions that women make – not discrimination – explain the majority of the so-called pay gap.


More here.