Women exist in all areas of society — women are democrats, republicans and independents. However, on Tuesday, April 8, differences were set aside as a women’s rights issue was passed by executive order through the hand of President Barack Obama.
The Keene, New Hampshire American Association of University Women (AAUW) President, Dawn Andonellis, commented on this legislation. She said the issue that affects women in society is not a partisan issue that prevented it from following the typical legislative process, but instead, it’s a human rights issue. “Women are every demographic, every party, every color, every state,” Andonellis said.
Andonellis continued with the idea that partisan ties impede progress of the government. “Why are we making our allegiance to a party more important than a particular part of our society, i.e. women?” Andonellis said, “So many things don’t get passed and don’t get done.”
AP Photo:
President Barack Obama gives two thumbs-up as women’s rights activist Lilly Ledbetter, left, acknowledges him in Washington D.C., Tuesday, April 8, 2014, during an event marking Equal Pay Day
Keene State College first-year student and biology and secondary education major, Madison Rice, said she was under the impression fair pay was established years ago. “I feel like a lot of people think there has been a lot of progressive movement towards women and their salaries. It’s shocking that it has taken this long,” Rice said. Even after the original fight for equal pay in the 1960s, the 2013 U.S. Census Bureau stated that women working full-time throughout the year earned 77 percent of the salary of men, according to the National Committee on Pay Equity website. The 2013 Census also stated that, even professions that employee primarily female workers; women earn less in their occupation. This leaves women and their families with a wage deficit between 700,000 to $2 million a year.
According to the National Partnership website in their article, “Pay in New Hampshire, New Hampshire Women and the Wage Gap,” life without a pay gap would provide benefits for women and their families. The article continued and said common concerns like food, mortgage payments and gas would be less of a worry. It also read that women would be able to pay for 92 more weeks of food, seven extra months of mortgage and utility payments and 3,535 more gallons of gas. KSC freshman, Kyle Hastbacka, said when men and women are working the same job, they should receive the same pay.
“It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, guy or girl — if you are doing the same job, maybe even better, you deserve to be paid for how you are doing the job,” Hastbacka said.
Laura Bassett of The Huffington Post reported on the details of Executive Orders in an article titled, “Obama To Sign Executive Orders On Equal Pay.” The article stated the second executive order “will instruct the Department of Labor to develop new regulations that require federal contractors to report wage-related data to the government.” According to the article, this is in hopes it will hold federal contractors more accountable for salary differences based on sex or race. Andonellis explained why she fights for women’s rights and said she has a daughter attending University of New Hampshire.
The fear of graduating to unequal pay that is stated on the AAUW website in the “Graduating to a Pay Gap” explains the reality for women in this day and age.
Andonellis said she believes unequal pay is unfair for women, and people she cares about. “I don’t think that is fair for my daughter…This is, maybe, something I can do to help my kids,” Andonellis said.
According to the website shaheen.senate.gov., Senator, Jeanne Shaheen expressed her support of the Equal Pay Day proclamation. “Pay discrimination is not fair, is not right, and every day that it persists is a day when we do an injustice to hard working American women. Equal Pay Day is a stark reminder that while we have made progress in the last several decades, pay discrimination continues to hurt women, families and the economy,” Shaheen said.
Andonellis said she is optimistic because of recent conversations with the New Hampshire Mayor, Kendall Lane that the City of Keene will support Equal Pay Day.
Anna Glassman can be contacted at aglassman@keene-equinox.com
MaleMatters
Here’s what Obama, the Democrats, and Andonellis don’t want you to know about women, men, and the wage gap:
Even the liberal Washington Post’s fact checker doubled the Pinocchios given to Obama:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2014/04/09/president-obamas-persistent-77-cent-claim-on-the-wage-gap-gets-a-new-pinocchio-rating/
In general, women not only live longer and enjoy better health than men, who die sooner and at a higher rate of the 12 leading causes of death, they also control most of consumer spending and most of the nation’s wealth. Soon they will control even more.
“Over the next decade, women will control two thirds of consumer wealth in the United States and be the beneficiaries of the largest transference of wealth in our country’s history. Estimates range from $12 to $40 trillion. Many Boomer women will experience a double inheritance windfall, from both parents and husband.” -http://www.she-conomy.com/facts-on-women
Does this sound like the oppressed group — the longer-living, healthier, wealthier group — that Obama and the Democrats would have you believe women are?
About women’s “77 cents to men’s dollar for the same work”: I suspect that many if not most of pay-equity advocates think employers are greedy profiteers who’d hire only illegal immigrants for their lower labor cost if they could get away with it. Or who’d move their business to a cheap-labor country to save money. Or replace older workers with younger ones for the same reason. So why do these same advocates think employers would NOT hire only women if, as they say, employers DO get away with paying females at a lower rate than males for the same work?
Here’s one of countless examples showing that some of the most sophisticated women in the country choose to earn less while getting paid at the same rate as their male counterparts:
“In 2011, 22% of male physicians and 44% of female physicians worked less than full time, up from 7% of men and 29% of women from Cejka’s 2005 survey.” ama-assn.org/amednews/2012/03/26/bil10326.htm
A thousand laws won’t close that gap.
In fact, no law yet has closed the gender wage gap — not the 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, not Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, not affirmative action (which has benefited mostly white women, the group most vocal about the wage gap – tinyurl.com/74cooen), not the 1991 amendments to Title VII, not the 1991 Glass Ceiling Commission created by the Civil Rights Act, not the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, not diversity, not the countless state and local laws and regulations, not the thousands of company mentors for women, not the horde of overseers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, not TV’s and movies’ last two decades of casting women as thoroughly integrated into the world of work (while making the huge mistake of rarely casting men as integrated into the world of children: malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/in-movies-dads-not-treated-as-equals-to-moms/) and not the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which is another feel-good bill that turned into another do-nothing law (political intentions disguised as good intentions do not necessarily make things better, and sometimes make things worse)…. Nor will a “paycheck fairness” law work.
That’s because women’s pay-equity advocates, who always insist one more law is needed, continue to overlook the effects of female AND male behavior:
Despite the 40-year-old demand for women’s equal pay, millions of wives still choose to have no pay at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of “The Secrets of Happily Married Women,” stay-at-home wives, including the childless who represent an estimated 10 percent, constitute a growing niche. “In the past few years,” he says in a CNN report at tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier….” at tinyurl.com/qqkaka. If indeed a higher percentage of women is staying at home, perhaps it’s because feminists and the media have told women for years that female workers are paid less than men in the same jobs — so why bother working outside the home if they’re going to be penalized and humiliated for being a woman, as illustrated by such titles as this: “Gender wage gap sees women spend 7 weeks working for nothing” http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/cwgbaueysnsn/rss2/.)
As full-time mothers or homemakers, stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living in luxury? Answer: Because they’re supported by their husband, an “employer” who pays them to stay at home. (Far more wives are supported by a spouse than are husbands.)
The implication of this is probably obvious to most 12-year-olds but seems incomprehensible to, or is wrongly dismissed as irrelevant by, feminists and the liberal media: If millions of wives are able to accept NO wages, millions of other wives, whose husbands’ incomes vary, are more often able than husbands to:
-accept low wages
-refuse overtime and promotions
-choose jobs based on interest first, wages second — the reverse of what men tend to do (The most popular job for American women as of 2010 is still secretary/administrative assistant, which has been a top ten job for women for the last 50 years. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/11/gender-wage-gap_n_3424084.html)
-take more unpaid days off
-avoid uncomfortable wage-bargaining (tinyurl.com/3a5nlay)
-work fewer hours than their male counterparts, or work less than full-time more often than their male counterparts (as in the above example regarding physicians)
Any one of these job choices lowers women’s median pay relative to men’s. And when a wife makes one of the choices, her husband often must take up the slack, thereby increasing HIS pay.
Women who make these choices are generally able to do so because they are supported — or, if unmarried, anticipate being supported — by a husband who feels pressured to earn more than if he’d chosen never to marry. (Married men earn more than single men, but even many men who shun marriage, unlike their female counterparts, feel their self worth is tied to their net worth.) This is how MEN help create the wage gap: as a group they tend more than women to pass up jobs that interest them for ones that pay well.
Other ways that help set the stage for a wage gap to be created:
-Far more men than women link their self-worth to their net-worth.
-Far more women than men seek spouses with a high net-worth (hypergamy)
-Far more single women than single men ask prospective dates, “What do you do?” And (because of hypergamy) they listen more closely to the answer.
-Far more women than men expect their spouse to be the primary provider who will give them the option of staying at home to raise the children, while the spouse raises the income that pays her to raise the children.
-Far more women look at a prospective spouse as an “employer” who will pay them to stay at home when they choose to do so.
“The more alarming wage gap might be the one between mothers and childless women: One recent paper (http://www.npr.org/2012/02/07/146522483/the-wage-gap-between-moms-other-working-women) found that women with kids make roughly 7 to 14 percent less than women without them.” So why do organized feminists and the liberal media focus only on — and criticize — the wage gap between men and women? http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/the-mommy-track-myth/283557/
More in “Does the Ledbetter Act Help Women?” malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/will-the-ledbetter-fair-pay-act-help-women/