As the impeachment embers fade, Washington is getting back to business, but not before settling a few scores and tying up loose ends. The White House, in particular, has debts to pay off and supporters are already cashing in their chips.

After months of defending the sort of behavior they had launched social wars to stop, feminists such as Patricia Ireland and Eleanor Smeal are getting some generous attention. The President recently announced a $14 million dollar pledge to expand the legion of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission officers, and called for a loosening of the limits on damages awards in discrimination lawsuits.

President Clinton described his initiative as an attempt "to make sure every American fairly benefits from this moment of prosperity." Then he trotted out the dog-eared and discredited statistic that American women earn 75 cents for every dollar earned by American men. In the President’s view of the world, men and women around the country are doing exactly the same job, with exactly the same experience, education, seniority and talent, but women are paid 75-percent of the other’s salary simply because they are women. But this claim fails to match reality.

Wage-gap statistics, though a convenient weapon for activists, simply cannot account for individual choices and initiative. It remains true that despite the boundless opportunities that exist for women today, women and men in the aggregate continue to make different choices about their education, their career paths, and the balance between the personal and the professional. These different choices can, but do not always, translate into different salaries. These aggregate differences, however, cannot be counted on to reveal any great truths about the climate of work for women today.

The President’s own administration has acknowledged that the wage gap between men and women is too complex to ascribe entirely to discrimination. "It is difficult to determine precisely how much of the difference in female/male pay is due to discrimination and how much is due to differences in choices or preferences between women and men," admits "Explaining Trends in the Gender Gap," a report issued last year by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.

This sort of concession to a more optimist view of today’s work force could be quite a blow to the entire feminist movement, but not to worry. Those reports are safely gathering dust, and the President shows himself eager to advance an agenda based on a fiction more friendly to his supporters.

Of course, in the scale of Washington payoffs, $14 million is a drop in the bucket. Once the money gets stretched between the Department of Labor and the EEOC, as the President announced, there will hardly be enough left for either beneficiary to make much noise. Of more concern is the persistent faith of the President and his feminist allies in the myth of modern gender oppression.

The story of women in today’s work force is one of progress, cooperation with male colleagues, and success. Women now enjoy the freedom to build a life based on individual choices, not group expectations. At the dawn of a new millennium, it’s time to embrace and expand these realities, not to turn back the clock to fantasies based on bogus statistics.

— Katherine Post

PRI Senior Fellow,

Women's Studies