The Limitations of Law in Fighting Discrimination

My Daughter Tracy

Another good AC. The article brings up some tough issues that are important to think about directly. 1) What are the causes of the discrepancy in pay? 2) What role should law have in connection with this problem? I thought the article was interesting in that it gave two causes, neither of which ultimately may have any legal solution.

Employers higher people in order to produce value for the business. An employer cannot afford to pay wages in excess of what an employee produces without having to take the difference from the production of other employees. Further, if an employer pays all employees more than they produce, the business will soon go out of business. Thus, if a person's schedule or other circumstances causes them to be less productive than other workers, we should expect that to be reflected in pay. In this case if we are saying that as a group, women have schedules that cause them to be less productive, then it would not be discrimination based on gender by the employer that they are as a group paid less. Rather, the ultimate cause may be cultural norms which place a greater burden for children and household on women than on men. In that case, the appropriate response might be to work on changing the culture in the home. When my mother returned to teaching in the 1970s, she was very clear to my father that she would not tolerate an uneven sharing of household responsibilities, and she didn't from that point on, they both shared those responsibilities very evenly.

The second problem identified in the article was choice of career. If employers are steering that choice, by hiring men for high paying jobs and women for low paying jobs, then law has a valid role. That is clear discrimination and the law should respond and punish such behavior. However, to the extent there is a cultural component, which steers women into certain choices, again that would be something that needs a cultural response. For example, I think it is gradually changing, but it used to be that mostly women went into nursing. If you looked at a hospital or a doctor's office, men were the doctors and women were the nurses. I think just seeing the world set up in a certain way has an impact on children. Girls and boys are more inclined to place themselves into categories based on what they see. All of these types of messages are difficult to change through law. I know from the time my daughter was young, I have tried to point out these cultural messages to her and let her know that she does not need to be bound by them. Her goal now is to go to medical school, earn an MD and become a psychiatrist.

In other words, if we can identify the real causes for things and work to counter the cause, over the long term I think we will see the wage rates even out. Or they will change to the point where people are really freely and openly make their own decisions because they feel that will make for a better life for themselves and the ones they love.