What's Good For The Goose...

President Obama wisely used his weekly address yesterday to talk about jobs, specifically women wage earners and to press for Congress to take up and pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, which failed last year thanks to Republicans.

Obama, in his weekly address, said he was disappointed when the Senate fell just short of approving the Paycheck Fairness Act last year. He urged Congress to take another crack at it and vowed, "I'm going to keep up the fight to pass the reforms in that bill."

The legislation would treat gender discrimination involving wages in the same manner as discrimination related to race, age or disability -- effectively opening up another avenue for court challenges. Many business interests oppose it because they fear a flood of litigation.

"At a time when folks across this country are struggling to make ends meet -- and many families are just trying to get by on one paycheck after a job loss -- it's a reminder that achieving equal pay for equal work isn't just a women's issue. It's a family issue," Obama said. "It is something I care deeply about as the father of two daughters who wants to see his girls grow up in a world where there are no limits to what they can achieve," he said.

Women have made great strides, he said. For instance, they are now more likely to attend college than men. Yet American women are also more likely to live in poverty and still earn only 75 cents for every dollar made by male workers, the president said.

Bon's mentioned this before, giving the advice that women have no choice but to accept it, try to get around it, and to deal with it.  Women earning only three-quarters of what men are isn't exactly fair, and gosh, businesses would only have to fear litigation if somehow there was a systemic effort by companies to pay women less than what their male counterparts earned in the same position.

The screaming of both businesses and the Republicans they own that this bill needs to die, die, die should tell you if that's true or not.  As a male African-American in a technology-oriented field, I can tell you that are plenty of women in the tech workplace and in management positions as well, but it's nowhere near 50-50 parity, especially at upper management levels.  That's true for a number of business sectors.

The fact that both men and women accept gender pay disparity as a given in 2011 should bother more people, I think.  Remember, every single GOP senator voted against this in the lame duck session last November, including three female GOP senators, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Kay Bailey Hutchinson (and Lisa Murkowski wasn't present for the vote).

There's no way the Republican-controlled House will even bother to bring up a vote on this, either.  Interestingly enough, when Bill Clinton proposed the Paycheck Fairness Act in 1998, women earned 77 cents on the dollar for what men did.  That only got worse over the last decade as it's now 74 cents for all women, and for African-American women and Latinas it's far worse:  61 cents and 52 cents on the dollar, respectively.

But we can't pass a law to make this fair because of the class action lawsuits.  Republicans freely admit that there is massive disparity in gender pay, but it's just too much of a bother to blame our most precious national resource, the business owner.  Sorry, someone might sue!

Besides, Republicans think you should be in kitchen making pie and wiping snotty noses anyway, girls.  Only bad girls have to work, because they haven't found a man to submit to, or something.