Gender victimization groups are marking April 8 on their calendar. That’s the day when, by their accounting, a working woman’s earnings catch up to those of a working man for the previous year.

"Pay Equity Day" is organized by the National Committee on Pay Equity and supported by groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) and labor unions. On April 8, these groups will protest the victimization of women in the workplace, the wage gap, and the impenetrable glass ceiling. Both they and the press, which often uncritically recycle their horror stories, would do better to use the occasion for examination of some neglected facts.

Today, many women’s groups have abandoned "equal opportunity" and are now calling for government action to create gender preferences that aim to guarantee women equal outcomes in earnings and representation in management. These advocates presume that unequal outcomes are due to discrimination, ignoring individual choices, preferences, and personal decisions.

By failing to examine historic trends in women’s labor-force participation and educational attainment, one can mistakenly over-credit civil rights and equal-pay legislation for many of the opportunities women now enjoy. A new book by economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth and historian Christine Stolba documents women’s meteoric rise throughout the century. Women’s Figures: An Illustrated Guide to the Economic Progress of Women in America (Independent Women’s Forum and the American Enterprise Institute, 1999) debunks the gender victimization myths of the glass ceiling, the wage gap, and the pink ghetto.

That is not to deny that women have not benefited from equal protection under the law, but it is important to realize that there is a distinction between opportunity and preference. Opportunity, however unequal, is responsible for many of the gains and successes that women now enjoy.

Women’s dramatic gains in academia, the workplace, and the political world are cause for celebration. But as feminist leaders continue to use the wage gap and glass ceiling as rallying cries for further government action, some have come to believe that, absent gender preferences, women would not have achieved dramatic gains in these areas. Such is not the case.

Whether at the turn of the century or today, the single necessary condition of women’s success is affirmative action in its original sense — equality of opportunity. This should be the guiding principle of today’s women’s movement. According to women, anything beyond the same rights and opportunities as men, without special preferences, assumes that women will not continue to succeed. But the record confirms that, given equal opportunity, women do very well indeed.

On April 8, or any other day, it would be better to celebrate that remarkable record than to air again the predictable list of grievances, accompanied with a call for yet more government intervention into women’s lives.

—Naomi Lopez

Naomi Lopez is director of the Center for Enterprise and Opportunity at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and author of the forthcoming briefing "Free Markets, Free Choices II: Smashing the Wage Gap and Glass Ceiling Myths" (Pacific Research Institute, April 1999).