The prospect of the first female president of the United States is fascinating to all, regardless of age or gender, and Elizabeth Dole’s entrance and rapid departure from the race made headlines.

Touted as a political moderate with special insight into women’s issues, Dole appealed to a large number of young women who had been previously uninterested in presidential politics. But behind the high-profile gender issues of the headlines lie a number of realities equally newsworthy but largely uncovered.

Prominent among them are the many tax biases against women, recently exposed by law professor Edward J. McCaffery in Taxing Women (University of Chicago Press, 1997). Since the tax system was designed early in the century when few women worked outside the home, the system is based on the concept of a male breadwinner with a stay-at-home wife.

For example, a married woman who works outside the home (and earns less than her husband) will receive the same Social Security "widow" benefit as her stay-at-home counterpart, regardless of her lifetime payroll tax contributions. This is particularly important when considering that an average-wage woman could contribute $150,000 (including interest) in lifetime combined employer-employee payroll tax contributions, yet receive no additional retirement benefit for her contributions.

The "marriage penalty" is yet another example of unfair tax treatment toward married women who work outside the home. Under the current tax code, many married couples are paying more taxes than they would if they were taxed as two singles. This can be particularly detrimental to lower income families where working outside the home is a necessity rather than a choice.

In 1914, the per-capita tax burden was $76 (in 1998 dollars). Today, individuals pay more than $960 billion in individual income taxes; $682 billion in social insurance payroll taxes and $83 billion in sales and excise taxes for a whopping $1.6 trillion tax bill. That is the equivalent of more than $15,000 per household going directly to Washington to pay for individual taxes and does not even include any corporate taxes or state and local taxes.

Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute recently wrote, "It [federal tax system] was never supposed to be this way. The very first income tax in 1913 had rates ranging from 1 to 7 percent – with the highest rate applying only to Americans who had the equivalent of a $5 million or more income today…Today, the top tax rate stands at 39.6 percent." What’s more, in the midst of attempting to balance family and work, the government is taxing away women’s earnings and their prospects for a secure retirement.

Meanwhile, as the current field of candidates begins their pro-women posturing and rhetoric, in hopes of picking up Dole supporters, they should stop segregating "women’s issues" from tax policy. All candidates would be well-served to support a less burdensome tax system – both in terms of tax simplification and fairness to women. In this way they could prove what the media have yet to learn, that the president need not be a woman to pursue a pro-women presidency.

—Naomi Lopez