What an awful coincidence for Feminists that their faux-holiday, “Equal Pay Day,” also falls on Tax Day this year.
“Equal Pay Day” was instituted in 1996 by the National Committee on Pay Equity to raise awareness about the misleading statistic that women earn only about three-fourths as much money as men. The day always falls on a Tuesday in April, which means to illustrate that women must work into April of the following year to earn the same amount of money as men earned in the previous year (and also symbolically, into Tuesday of the following week to earn what men earned the week before).
But this year, Equal Pay Day falls on the same day as Tax Day. This is unfortunate for the Feminist propaganda campaign, because frankly, today American women are more concerned with the oppression of Uncle Sam than they are with sexism.
Most women get it: We can do anything men can. But just because we can… doesn’t mean we want to. I saw a woman doing hard labor at a construction site last week, hardhat and all. God bless her if that’s her calling… It’s not mine.
When we make different choices – for example, working fewer hours or choosing a job with more flexibility – we often make a trade off that results in lower pay. That’s not sexism; that just means we’re choosing a differently structured compensation package.
It’s hard to put a dollar amount on how satisfied you are with your work/life balance. But it’s possible. Just imagine: You are offered two jobs. Job A has a salary of $30,000, but you can work from home and spend more time with your kids. Job B has a salary of $50,000, but you’ll be required to travel for business, often taking overnight trips and leaving your kids with someone else. Is it worth it to you to have $20,000 (before taxes!) in order to spend more time with your kids? It’s not hard to imagine that women and men might answer this question differently, or find different price points that push them one way or another.
But in the scenario I just described… You were offered two jobs. What a laugh! That would be a rare and enviable circumstance in today’s economy. Women (and men) have much greater concerns about money than a false narrative about women’s pay. The flagging jobs market, the growth in government regulation, and our burdensome tax system are just a few examples of our real economic troubles.
When women lick the envelopes to send their money to the government, I wonder if they are considering that the average American tax payer works for the first few months of the year just to earn enough to pay their taxes (the idea behind “Tax Freedom Day” …also today). I bet that is closer to their minds than the “Equal Pay Day.”