In spite of the gains made by the women's movement toward gender equality in American life, true equality has not been achieved in many areas, including the economic sphere. Surveys show that women on average earn significantly less than male workers, and indeed more than this, that women are paid significantly less than men for the same work. The overall figure usually given is that women earn sixty cents for every dollar paid to a male worker. One of the ways activists have tried to address this issue is to raise the solution of Comparable Worth whereby the nature of every job would be analyzed so that people doing the same job would be paid the same for their work regardless of gender. Legislation could be introduced, at the federal level, calling for the implementation of a national program of comparable worth . In both Senate and House committees the appropriate methodologies for deciding comparable worth calculations would have to be worked out.
We should adopt federal legislation that would help to equalize the earnings of men and women so that people doing the same or comparable work would receive the same pay. Companies offer a number of rationales for this pay disparity, but these are based on false premisses and cannot justify continuation of the unequal treatment.
The pay disparity that exists between men and women has a historical basis rather than a rational one. That is, women have only entered the workforce slowly throughout our history and have been shunted off to lower-paying and dead-end jobs for most of that history. Women at one time were denied the education they would need to perform in any better paying occupations. In addition, women were seen as not needing employment as much as did males. Women were expected to marry and to be supported by their husbands. Women's "proper" work was in the home, and work in the home was not paid. Whether true or not, women who worked outside the home were see...