Washington, D.C. — Let me make the case that there’s a day in April as irritating as Tax Day: it’s April 3rd, National Equal Pay Day. Designated by the National Committee on Pay Equity, it’s the day in 1998 when women earned as much as men in 1997.

In celebration of this day, President Clinton issued a proclamation urging businesses and government leaders to make a solemn commitment to recognize the value of women’s contributions to the workplace and to reward them appropriately. The President’s comments suggest that the opposite is currently the case — that women, universally and systematically, are paid less than men and that correcting this systemic discrimination should be a national priority. But is this really the case?

Of course it’s not the case. Wage discrimination based on sex has been illegal since the 1963 passage of the Equal Pay Act (which preceded the Civil Rights Act of 1964) which outlawed unequal pay for equal work. But to hear the President, the Vice-President and quite a few union-backed women’s groups complain about a persistent pay gap, none of that matters. According to them, men are still earning more than women and that is proof of a pervasive problem of discrimination.

You’ve probably heard the slogans about the wage gap between men and women — once upon a time, feminists wore “59 cents” buttons to indicate that women made only 59¢ for every dollar earned by a man. In 1997 women’s weekly earnings were 74 percent of men’s, so things have certainly changed, but not fast enough for the White House or their supporters. In fact, the President’s proclamation trots out the same old statistics, pointing to wider disparities for “women of color,” and alluding to a glass ceiling. He goes on to say that, “While women now hold almost half of all executive and managerial jobs, their wages are only 70 percent of the average pay of their male counterparts.”

What exactly do these numbers tell us about the success of women in the workforce? Nothing — except some general indications of improvement. These statistics are just that: numbers about massive groups of people that have no relation to the specifics of individual choices and initiative. Women and men in the aggregate 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. When one begins to account for those choices, as I reported in our 1995 study “Free Markets, Free Choices: Women in the Workforce,” the wage differences disappear.

The most vivid example comes from June O’Neill, a noted economist and current Director of the Congressional Budget Office. She discovered that for men and women between the ages of 27 and 33 who had never been married, the wage gap narrowed to two percentage points. This narrow gap does not account for career choice or educational choices — that’s how myopic and misleading wage gap statistics about the population as a whole can be!

Big surprise: the facts and figures don’t matter to the President. Equal Pay Day gives Clinton and his Administration an easy and attractive victim — working women — and a sufficiently vague assailant — employers. It’s political candy from a baby. To keep his finger in the pie, Vice President Gore announced his own set of initiatives for Equal Pay Day, including a 10-step voluntary self-audit in honor of Equal Pay Day for both private business and federal agencies to monitor their efforts on equal pay. In this era of self-flagellation, voluntary 10-step programs are just hokey enough to catch on. It’s too bad truth and optimism just aren’t so catchy.

—Katherine Post, Director of the Center for Enterprise and Opportunity