America loves touting political and social “milestones,” and this tendency has been apparent throughout the 2008 presidential race. The two most popular milestones are the prospect of having a black man or a woman as president. However, given the fabled reputation of America as the enlightened land of the free, these and other milestones should act as embarrassing reminders of America’s own persistent jingoism, bigotry, or archaic tendencies rather than an inspirational gift to the world, particularly when half the world has already gotten with the program much earlier. As was demonstrated with the death of a pay equity bill in the Senate yesterday along party lines, the U.S. is still grossly out of date in more than one respect.

The issue of occupational pay equity should not be a political issue. Paying a man one salary and a woman another for performing the same job to the same degree is not in keeping with American values of equality and nondiscrimination. However, as the Republican vote demonstrated, the claim that feminism has somehow done its job and men and women are completely equal is insulting. Even presidential hopeful John McCain opposed the measure. “I’m all in favor of pay equity for women,” remarked McCain during a campaign stop in New Orleans, “but this kind of legislation, as is typical of what’s being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems.”

While McCain will get his just desserts for publicly stating what amounts to a carbon seal of approval for neo Jim Crow norms affecting gender rather than race, it should be noted that the reasoning he gives does not hold up under scrutiny. In this case, the lawsuit hysteria does not hold up because employers would be able to circumvent legal risk and actually save money in the long run by simply complying with law, just as they are forced to do under nondiscrimination measures. While that claim is easy to debunk, McCain’s follow-up statement requires a bit more effort and a bit more data.

To give grounding to his position apart from the fear of a cadre of Harvard suits and ties descending on corporate America, McCain said that “they (women) need the education and training, particularly since more and more women are heads of their households.” This claim makes it seem as though American companies aren’t paying its women as much as its men because of a disparity in their training and income. While that might be true in isolated cases, the broader body of data makes this a statistical impossibility.

Allow me to dispel McCain’s spurious claim that women are somehow not learning enough or getting trained adequately to do the work that men do and subsequently get paid on an equitable basis. Gender discrimination in compensation is not a debatable point in the United States. The U.S. Bureau of Labor itself made the discrepancies very clear in a 2006 study entitled “Median Weekly Earnings for Full-Time Wage and Salary Workers by Detailed Occupation and Sex.” I have compiled the following numbers from the statistics presented in that study, adapted from my aborted blog, “The Eyewash Station.”

Women earn an average of $71 less per week than men (11% less)

Compared to men in the following occupational sectors, women earn the following per week on average:

Management Occupations: $201 less, 18% difference

Business & Financial Occupations: $102 less, 11% difference

Computer and Mathematical Occupations: $123 less, 11% difference

Architecture and engineering: $183 less, 16% difference

Life, Physical, and Social Science: $112 less, 11% difference

Community and Social Services: $37 less, 5% difference

Legal: $243 less, 21% difference

Education, Training, and Library: $56 less, 7% difference

Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and media: $108 less, 13% difference

Healthcare Practitioner and Technical: $45 less, 5% difference

Healthcare Support: $6 less, 1% difference

Protective Services: $136 less, 20% difference

Food Preparation and Serving Related: $16 less, 4% difference

Building and Grounds Cleaning and Maintenance: $43 less, 11% difference

Personal Care and Service: $19 less, 5% difference

Sales and Related: $141 less, 22% difference

Office and Administrative Support: $15 less, 3% difference

Service: $32 less, 8% difference

Farming, Fishing, and Forestry: $45 less, 12% difference

Construction and Extraction: $86 less, 14% difference

Installation, Maintenance, and Repair: $45 less, 6% difference

Production: $127 less, 23% difference

Transportation and Material Moving: $142 less, 26% difference

Needless to say, the facts speak for themselves. Women earn less in EVERY sector of our economy. Regardless of political persuasion, every American who believes in equality should be insulted by McCain’s justification for snubbing the pay equity bill and the party line vote in the Senate killing a bill that could have moved pay equity closer to better-late-than-never reality. When half the population of the United States is getting the shaft (literally), there is something seriously wrong and seriously shameful. And people should take notice.

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