After reading the testimony against Comparable Worth given this spring by the Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Constance Horner, it’s hard to see how any reasonable Congressperson could vote for this feminist folly. The bill is called the Federal Employee Compensation Equity Act of 1987, but it is actually an attempt to write into the law the silliness of Comparable Worth, including its false assumptions, biased views, and faulty methodology.
Director Horner’s statistics about how women have risen in the ranks of U.S. government employees are impressive. In 1976, more than half of the women employed by the Federal Government were in clerical jobs, while only 20 percent were in professional and administrative jobs.
By 1986, only 41 percent of women were federal clerical employees, while 33 percent were in professional and administrative positions. For example, in the under 35 age group, women comprise 41 percent of lawyers, 48 percent of accountants, 33 percent of medical officers, 27 percent of chemical engineers, and 44 percent of Internal Revenue agents.
Mrs. Horner tracked the upward climb of women who were hired into government jobs in 1976. She found that more than half of that group have now moved into other, higher-paying occupational groups, making it clear that clerical jobs need not be dead-end careers for women.
The favorite statistic used by advocates of Comparable Worth is the comparison of the wages of all men with all women. Mrs. Horner shows that this disparity is primarily the result of differences between men and women in occupational choices, educational attainment, and years of service.
When we examine employees under age 35 in 1986, females earned 78 percent of what males earned. In blue collar jobs, females earned 89 percent of what males earned. Female professionals earned 90 percent of what males earned, female administrative and technical employees 91 percent, and female clerical workers 104 percent of their male counterparts.
Mrs. Horner shows how the proposed “Compensation Equity” bill, which calls for raising the wages of traditionally female-dominated occupations, is really a demand for the “separate but equal” treatment of women. As she pointed out, this would reinforce sexual stereotypes and retard career advancement by women in the federal workforce by artificially inflating federal pay in so-called women’s jobs.
Mrs. Horner’s testimony shows that she understands basic economic factors, which obviously the Comparable Worth advocates do not. She stated that any system that is insufficiently responsive to market influences cannot function effectively in the long run because it will not be able to attract, retain, and motivate capable employees.
The keys to advancement for women in the workplace are equal pay for equal work, the prohibition of intentional pay discrimination and barriers to entry and promotion, the encouragement of occupational mobility, and emphasis on performance rather than seniority. Comparable Worth does nothing to implement any of these factors.
The blatant bias in the “Compensation Equity” bill is shown by the way it simply attempts to legislate the conclusion that any wage differentials between men and women must be attributed to discrimination. Mrs. Horner correctly explains that people enter the workforce with different work preferences, career expectations, restrictions on geographic mobility, leadership goals, attitudes, and preferences.
The use of numbers does not convert a subjective method into an objective one. The numbers merely represent a subjective judgment about the place of a specific job within a prescribed classification scheme, which, in turn, reflects the values of that scheme.
There is no such thing as intrinsic job worth, and there is no such thing as objective job evaluations. In the final analysis, Mrs. Horner testified, “every classification scheme reflects a set of values and boils down to a structured plan for making subjective judgments about jobs.”
The conclusions reached about what a job is worth depend on which consultant does the study, which evaluation scheme is used, and which occupations are sampled and compared. Different consultants, using different schemes, sampling a different mix of occupations, produce different conclusions about job worth.
That’s why the bill promoted by the feminists sets up a commission stacked with militant advocates of the Comparable Worth concept, and excludes those who have different views. Among those whom the proposed bill excludes from representation on the commission are federal personnel managers, budget and financial managers, the taxpaying public, and economists who believe that the free market system produces the highest wages for more people than any other wage system ever invented.
