Organized feminists have been among President Clinton’s most loyal supporters. The President is using his bully-pulpit to reward them by reviving a tired and discredited issue, the gender wage gap.

President Clinton has called for Congress to "make sure that men and women get equal pay by strengthening enforcement of equal-pay laws." One week later, citing "wage discrimination in the workplace," he announced a $14 million budget boost to the Department of Labor and Equal Employment Opportunity for equal-pay enforcement and threatened to teach corporate America a lesson.

The president’s Department of Labor Office of Contract Compliance has struck gold with it’s "glass-ceiling" audits of corporations. Among the companies found in need of reeducation: Texaco, Xerox, CoreStates Financial, US Airways, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Maryland. In January, Texaco agreed to settle for $3.1 million for its slights to 189 professional women.

"I hope the signal that companies are picking up is to conduct self-audits," Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman said after the Texaco settlement. "Don’t wait for the government to come knocking on your door."

In 1998, DOL recoveries were up 200 percent over 1997 and it plans even more action for 1999. With a budget of $67 million, funding 755 full-time employees, DOL’s office of compliance plans to conduct 40 glass-ceiling reviews this year, a four-fold increase over 1998. Clinton is also backing the Paycheck Fairness Act, sponsored by Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-SD) and Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-CT).

This bill would allow the Secretary of Labor to collect both compensatory and punitive damages from targeted firms. Worse, it builds the foundation for government mandated "comparable worth." The Secretary of Labor will develop voluntary guidelines for employers to "compare wages for different jobs to determine if pay scales adequately and fairly reflect each job’s educational and skill requirements, independence, working conditions, and responsibility, in order to eliminate unfair pay disparities between occupations traditionally dominated by men or women."

This depressing campaign has everything going for it but the facts. It’s not hard for the President to find a gap between the total wages earned by men and women. But since men and women work in different fields, for different spans of time, and for varying amounts of hours each day, this statistic is meaningless. When corrected for factors such as level of education, field of education, and continuous years worked, the gap narrows significantly and in some cases disappears. The President’s glass-ceiling crusade has blinded him to women’s progress in the corporate workplace.

Fortune magazine’s list of the 50 most powerful women in business includes key positions in industries ranging from pharmaceuticals, information technology, toys, cosmetics, retail, entertainment, and finance. According to Catalyst, a New York-based research organization, 86 percent of Fortune 500 companies have a female director; 36 percent have two or more. And the trend is toward more, not fewer, women in the executive ranks. Mattel CEO Jill Barad told Fortune that within a decade she expects to have 48 more female colleagues at the top.

Such optimism, unfortunately, strikes no chord with the Clinton Administration. The President is too busy paying off political debts to notice the remarkable progress of women in the workplace.

– Sally C. Pipes

President and CEO

Pacific Research Institute