For Immediate Release: January 27, 2000

San Francisco, CA – Monday, President Clinton announced a $27 million Equal Pay Initiative that "mistakenly presumes unequal outcomes are due to discrimination, ignores individual choices, preferences, and personal decisions – and sets a dangerous precedent by ignoring opportunity, the cornerstone of women’s achievements in the 20th century," according to Naomi Lopez, the study’s author and director of PRI’s Center for Enterprise and Opportunity.

Clinton’s initiative includes $10 million for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to identify wage discrimination, instruct employers to meet legal requirements, and commence a public service announcement campaign to tell businesses about their "rights and responsibilities". The plan also includes $10 million for the Labor Department to educate women in unconventional occupations, and $7 million for the Labor Department to facilitate improved pay policies.

President Clinton claims his plan is designed to fight wage discrimination but the plan ignores the dramatic advances that women have made. A 1999 Pacific Research Institute (PRI) study, "Free Markets, Free Choices: Smashing the Wage Gap and Glass Ceiling Myths," shows that women are making dramatic 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.

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 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 is earning more than her husband.

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

Overall, Lopez finds the disappearance of any "wage gap" when considering men and women with like fields of study, educational attainment, and continuous time spent in the workforce. In addition, she 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 actions to create gender preferences that aim to guarantee women equal outcomes in earnings and representation in management," states Lopez.

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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.