One order prohibits federal contractors from retaliating against those who disclose their pay (a practice supposedly designed to keep the disparity hush-hush). The second requires federal contractors to hand over to the government pay data by sex and race.
But as we’ve editorialized before, the “wage gap” is a myth that looms large. Even a Labor Department-commissioned study found, as the American Enterprise Institute’s Christina Hoff Sommers recounts, “that the so-called wage gap is mostly, and perhaps entirely, an artifact of the different choices men and women make — different fields of study, different professions, different balances between home and work.”
And as Carrie Lukas of the Independent Women’s Forum notes, the wage gap statistics aren’t statistically sound — they do not “compare two similarly situated co-workers of different sexes, working in the same industry, performing the same work, for the same number of hours a day.”
Of course, if Mr. Obama is so adamant about equal pay, he might want to start in his White House, where, last year, women were paid an estimated 11.8 percent less than men.
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This article was written by the Editorial Board of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.