For Immediate Release: May 10, 2000

San Francisco, CA – May 11 is Equal Pay Day, marked by women’s advocacy groups as the point in the new year when a woman’s pay matches that made by a man in the previous calendar year. The calculation is made by simply subtracting the average pay for females from that of males and determining how many extra days an average woman would have to work to attain the average male salary.

However, a recent update of a 1995 Pacific Research Institute (PRI) study, "Free Markets, Free Choices: Smashing the Wage Gap and Glass Ceiling Myths," refutes this misrepresentation and finds an absence of any "wage gap" when considering men and women with comparable fields of study, educational attainment, and continuous time spent in the workforce. The study also shows that women are making ardent strides in all areas, and that these strides are due to affirmative action in its original sense – equality of opportunity – and not to equality of results or representational parity.

"The historical record refutes the notion that women need special preferences and government programs in order to succeed. Given equal opportunity, they do as well – and in some areas even better – than their male counterparts," states Naomi Lopez, the study’s author and director of PRI’s Center for Enterprise and Opportunity.

Lopez proves her argument by citing the following examples:

In a number of traditionally high-paying, male-dominated fields, young women are earning as much as their young male counterparts. In architecture and environmental design, young women earn 95 percent of young men’s earnings; in engineering, they earn 99 percent; in chemistry, they earn 97 percent; and in computer and information sciences, they earn 94 percent.

Women have more than doubled their salaries – in real terms – in the last 50 years.

In the aggregate, women are actually earning more per hour than men are earning.

Although women represent only 46 percent of the U.S. labor force, women hold about half of all management jobs.

Today, about one in five married women earns more than her husband.

Women-owned businesses account for one-third of all firms in the United States.

In addition, Ms. Lopez predicts continual improvements in women’s wages as men and women more equally share domestic responsibilities and as women have fewer children and have them later in life.

"Many women’s advocates are abandoning legal protections that ensure equal opportunity in pursuit of government action to create gender preferences that aim to guarantee women equal outcomes in earnings and representation in management," states Lopez. "They are mistakenly presuming unequal outcomes are due to discrimination, ignoring individual choices, preferences, and personal decisions – and are setting a dangerous precedent by ignoring opportunity, the cornerstone of women’s achievements in the 20^th century."

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For more information, contact Dawn Dingwell by phone at 415/989.0833 x136, or visit PRI's web site at www.pacificresearch.org.

The Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy is a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of the principles of individual freedom and personal responsibility. The Institute believes these principles are best encouraged through policies that emphasize a free economy, private initiative, and limited government. By focusing on public policy issues such as health care, welfare, education, and the environment, the Institute strives to foster a better understanding of the principles of a free society among leaders in government, academia, the media, and the business community.