“Equal pay for equal work.” This concept, currently enforced by law, prevents a company from paying women differently from men who are in the same position. That is to say, two engineers of equivalent training doing the same work should be paid approximately the same. If a women can prove she is being paid significantly less than her male counter-parts she can sue. Justice Roberts was not in anyway arguing against that.

“Comparable Worth.” Judge Roberts was vehemently against this concept. The basic reason for wanting to institute a comparable worth law is that the average per person income of men is substantially higher than that of women. (This is where the sixty cents to the dollar statistic comes from.) This calculated by adding up the all incomes earned by men and dividing it by the number of men working and comparing it to the total income earned by all women divided by the number of women working. This is the case several years after the enactment of equal pay for equal worth. The question you might ask is, How can the difference be so large if equal pay for equal work is enforced? This is how; Imagine two different professions, one 80% male and 20% female, and the other 80$ female and 20% male. Everyone in the same profession gets the same pay, but if the first profession is paid more than the second, the men’s average income will be higher than the women’s average income and vice versa. There are many professions dominated by one gender over the other: nursing(women), computer engineering (men), elementary school teachers (women), university professors (men). Comparable worth is an attempt to account for this difference and make the average income for each gender more equivalent. What it does is it takes two different professions that require comparable skill, effort, and training and enforce equal pay between the two professions. So nursing and computer engineering might be said to be comparable in the skill and training required, so both professions should be paid the same. This is not currently in effect, it was deemed unconstitutional by the Courts. Roberts was not involved in the court decision, he was in the Reagan administration at that time.

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So now it’s up to employers to offer women more money, it’s not up to women to ask for it, lol. Like that’s going to happen. I set my salary, no one else, but I don’t see myself as a victim waiting for a wrong. I don’t accept your assertion that women are victims of discrimination unless that discrimination can be proven. You seem to think it is an absolute, but that’s what your indoctrination told you. By the way you didn’t show were Roberts failed to apply the law as a judge and you admited the idea was flawed, so then Roberts was correct. “As an assistant White House counsel in 1984, John Roberts …” He wasn’t a judge, he was a lawyer who stated his opinion of someone else’s opinion, maybe you need to read it yourself. “A three-judge federal appeals court panel later reversed the decision…” The court agreed with Roberts.

You can’t calculate it as such, no. The best you can do is to look for places where it is obviously way off.

Gary you hit on a good point, because like most people you don’t know how much your coworkers make, most people don’t, they negotiate the best they can for themselves. If women can’t negotiate as well as men, who’s [sic] fault is that?

Already asked and answered. Comment #18 in this thread. Scroll up. Read.

If they are willing to accept less than men, who’s [sic] fault is that?

That depends whether “willing” really means “willing” or means “forced into”. For lack of God’s sake, NOBODY turns down extra money when it is offered. Your salary isn’t a matter of what you’re willing to accept, it’s a matter of what employers are willing to pay you.

Gary show where Roberts has failed to apply the law as written in the area of equal rights?

Try reading the original post in this thread.

Roberts was right, this is a stupid idea. How would you calculate something like this?

Gary you hit on a good point, because like most people you don’t know how much your coworkers make, most people don’t, they negotiate the best they can for themselves. If women can’t negotiate as well as men, who’s fault is that? If they are willing to accept less than men, who’s fault is that? Gary show where Roberts has failed to apply the law as written in the area of equal rights?

For one thing, because of judges like Roberts who are doing their best to defeat any enforcement of said present law.

If all Garys coworkers are in the same bracket then what’s the problem?

Assuming that to be true (and I have no idea if it is — the only salary figure I have any knowledge of is my own) then there is no problem at my company for those of us in my particular role. That however doesn’t mean that it isn’t a problem for anyone anywhere.

If this law wasn’t in place, there would be employers that would chose to a)promote men over women, or b) promote straight people over gays, or c) promote whites over blacks. They would do this because they either a)felt that women should stay at home, b)didn’t agree with homosexuality, or c)didn’t like the color of their skin. I don’t know what world you live in, but from where I sit, those backwards employers are still out there.

Um, no, but thanks for playing. The fact that there’s discrimination against certain races and genders doesn’t mean that there aren’t unfair inequalities within any given race and gender group. But this sort of thing is much more difficult to prove than any sort of systematic discrimination.

If management promotes based on non performance based criteria then the company suffers.

Maybe so, but companies frequently do it anyway. Because the individual making the promotion decision has first and foremost his own interests in mind, which may not, and often do not, coincide with the interests of the company as a whole.

So under the law you guys want, would I as a white hetro man be protected from bias from a lesbian boss who I had a personality conflict with?

If you can prove systematic discrimination, yes. Lotsa luck. Lesbians do not wield the majority of economic and political power in this country, contrary to any delusions you might have to that effect.

and actually if you felt that you had been discriminated against you are allowed to bring a lawsuit. and I can definitly see Fake as having personality conflicts with most supervisors.

In terms of the economic and political power they wield, they are certainly not equal. The vast majority of the executives who decide who gets a raise and who gets fired are men. In an objective competition in which everybody starts on equal footing, women will on average do just as well as men. But this competition isn’t objective, being judged completely subjectively by mostly men, and not everybody starts equal, since gender discrimination permeates education as well as the workplace.

And please don’t try telling us that employers will have to reward good performance because they can’t afford to lose their good employees. If that’s what you think, then you need to get out into the real world more. Inter-company politics — “good ol’ boy” networks and one hand washing the other — have far more effect on promotions and raises than merit does. And no worker is indispensible.

I should mention, so the above isn’t misinterpreted, that I’m quite satisfied with my own employment situation.