COMMENTARY DISCOVERS A PLOT
Rosenberg, Jan
Just when you thought you'd heard too many complex arguments about "comparable worth," Michael Levin, Commentary's antifeminist-in-residence, comes along to simplify matters. It's all a plot to...
...Equal pay for equal work," the forerunner of comparable worth, was built on the now discredited assumption that male/female differences in regard to work were on the verge of extinction and that women would quickly move into previously all-male jobs, once overt, intentional discrimination vanished...
...Yet these facts—not abstract, unprovable arguments about biology—underlie the day-to-day realities that fire the movement toward comparable worth...
...Michael Levin seems to believe that he's fighting a desperate struggle to halt perfidious schemes to undermine American capitalism...
...And he observes that advocates of comparable worth use an extremely broad, vague, and tautological definition of discrimination...
...One could argue more persuasively that comparable worth grew out of the recognition that differences in social and work roles are as clear now as ever and not at all likely to disappear...
...Levin refers to "market wages" as the wages they [workers] all agree to accept...
...In the beginning there is the wage gap, the infamous merely 59 percent that women earn of men's total wages...
...The real reason so many women continue to enter distinctly female, low-wage jobs is their genetic inheritance, Levin warns...
...If women would only acknowledge the basic differences between the sexes, particularly ". . . the male's amply documented greater innate competitiveness, his tendency to do whatever is necessary to ascend hierarchies, including the hierarchies of modern business organizations," they could graciously accept the inevitability of the wage gap...
...Levin points out that the pivotal notion of a "just price"—a fair measure of the value of specific jobs—has long eluded political economists and philosophers and is not likely to yield to a new band of job-evaluation experts...
...Then one quantifies variables thought to cause the difference (education and so forth) between women's and men's wages...
...But we still have to come to Levin's and Commentary's fatal blow against comparable worth...
...Levin seems to live entirely in a world of carefully screened ideologies and assumes the rest of us are similarly situated...
...The structures of male and female work and wages have, so far, more closely reflected past social norms and family-work relationships...
...It includes the portion of the wage gap (the difference between the average wages for men and for women) that can't be explained by particular variables, such as education, labor-force participation and experience...
...Levin puts it, is its tendency, in the United States, to discriminate on the basis of ascribed characteristics like sex and race...
...One of these "excesses," as Mr...
...and many women are increasingly reluctant to accept wages they have come to see as inadequate and unfair, whatever the historic-cultural patterns in which they were once embedded...
...117...
...but today many women (from those living alone to those heading their own families or co-heading 116 families with partners) suffer severely from the continuation of these patterns...
...In actuality, he provides a justification for continuing to underpay the women of the "silent majority" Commentary claims to speak for...
...Whatever is left (usually about 20 to 30 percent of the gap) is called discrimination, thus defining out of existence the traditional family values that surely propelled women into predominantly female jobs even though they paid poorly...
...This must come as a big surprise to the female and male trade unionists who have seized on it as a promising strategy to raise the low levels of women's wages...
...He warns of the meritocratic assumptions and credentialist implications of comparable worth...
...Wage differentials, you see, are rooted in biology...
...According to Levin, it is not a low wage (or even a sense of "relative deprivation") that fans these flames...
...Comparable worth rests instead on the recognition that for many reasons women and men will continue to do different kinds of work to support their families...
...It is, rather, "this rage at all difference in the basic social role of the sexes [that] underlies the campaign for comparable worth...
...Here Levin begins with the standard criticisms of comparable worth, opening with the claim that it is a frontal assault on the "free market," different from such earlier measures as the minimum wage and banking regulations seeking to "preserve the free market against its own excesses...
...His article mentions only once the actual wages earned by real men and women in specific jobs, and it never mentions the number of women now heading their own households...
...What, then, about the compelling conservative claim that many women traditionally value family over work, particularly while their children are young, and choose relatively low-paying jobs that allow easy exit and reentry, good hours (compatible with family responsibilities), and convenient locations...
...Exactly...
...It's all a plot to destroy capitalism and establish socialism (Michael Levin, "Comparable Worth: The Feminist Road to Socialism," Commentary, September 1984...
Vol. 32 • January 1985 • No. 1
