My mom worked at a bank in Kentucky for over 30 years. She was a secretary and teller. The only time she got a raise was when they raised the minimum wage. The men she trained made a lot more.

Mom is no longer with us, but for the love of women everywhere, why is this blatant discrimination permitted to persist?

Mika damn near bit off Steele's head when he suggested that the timing of this might have been tied to the election...DUH ?....do you think so ?....and Mika showed again why she makes $.77 to Joe Scarborough's $2.00 with her pout, and her PMS-filled attitude all morning. The guests were praying for the second they could leave the set, ol' Mika couldn't carry the water without Joe there to feed her.....it was hilarious, even one of her friends e-mailed her about her attitude, and the dummy read it on the air

hard to believe there is even a debate about this. of course republicans will vote against the bill. it's pretty simple. they hate women. just as they hate minorities, immigrants, gays, and anybody else who isn't a straight white so-called "Christian". it's like these @!$%#s never left hight school, anybody different than they are in the slightest way is to be screwed over and discriminated against. conservatives are children hiding behind "the free market". bigots and misogynists draped in the flag and thumping the Bible to validate their petty prejudices.

Assume a pay gap exists between men and women “doing equivalent work.” Let's test that assumption. Imagine a company who decides it will hire 100% women for its workforce and split the supposed pay gap. That is, pay them more than the average “women's pay”, and less than the average “men's pay.” They would be able to hire top-notch female employees because of the higher pay they offered, be able to out-compete other companies in their industry due to their lower labor costs, and earn higher profit margins. Instant success!

The fact that this has not already happened, indicates that the primary pay-gap assumption is flawed.

I support full equality for men and women in the workplace. But the hard numbers dont lie. Women dwarf men when it comes to taking sick days, maternity leave and personal days off for family, medical apointments, ect. While those may be worthwhile and necessary things for many working women to do. To say that they are being 'penalized' for the extra time off by being payed lower wages on average, is a flawed argument. Employers cant use your expertise and work skills, if youre not there. Just the reality of it.

The sole driving force behind the Paycheck Fairness Act, as well as the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, is the belief that women earn 77 cents to men's dollar in the same jobs.

Contrary to what pay-equity advocates say, though, “women's 77 cents to men's dollar” does NOT mean women are paid less than men in the same jobs. Nor does it mean, even more incredibly in the vein of “men are stronger than women” (which means to many that every man is stronger than every woman), that every woman earns 23% less than every man, perhaps leading some of the more benighted and the blinkered ideological to believe Diane Sawyer of ABC News earns less than the young man walking up and down the street wearing a “Pizzas $5” sign.

The figures are arrived at by comparing the sexes' median incomes: women's median is 77 percent of men's. In 2009, the median income of full-time, year-round workers was $47,127 for men, compared to $36,278 for women or 77 percent of men's median. http://www.catalyst.org/publication/217/womens-earnings-and-income

Median means 50% of workers earn above the figures and 50% below. That means that a lot of female workers in the higher ranges of women's median make more money than a lot of male workers in the lower ranges of men's median.

“Women's 77 cents to men's dollar” doesn't account for the number of hours worked each week, experience, seniority, training, education or even the job description itself. It compares all women to all men, not people in the same job with the same experience. So the salary of a 60-year-old male computer engineer with 30 years at his company is weighed against that of a young first-year female teacher. Also, men are much more likely than women to work two jobs; hence, more often than women, a man earning $50,000 from his two jobs is weighed against a women earning $25,000 from her one job, so that he appears to be unfairly earning twice as much as she.

Over the decades, strategically ignoring the true meaning of "women's 77 cents to men's dollar" has been less than productive:

No law yet has closed the gender wage gap — not the 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, not Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, not the 1991 amendments to Title VII, not affirmative action (which has benefited mostly white women, the group most vocal about the wage gap - http://tinyurl.com/74cooen), not diversity, not the countless state and local laws and regulations, not the horde of overseers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and not the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.... Nor will a "paycheck fairness" law work.

That's because women's pay-equity advocates, who always insist one more law is needed, continue to overlook the effects of female AND male behavior:

Despite the 40-year-old demand for women's equal pay, millions of wives still choose to have no pay at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of "The Secrets of Happily Married Women," stay-at-home wives, including the childless who represent an estimated 10 percent, constitute a growing niche. "In the past few years,” he says in a CNN report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier....” at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka. If indeed a higher percentage of women is staying at home, perhaps it's because feminists and the media have told women for years that female workers are paid less than men in the same jobs — so why bother working if they're going to be penalized and humiliated for being a woman.)

As full-time mothers or homemakers, stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living in luxury? Because they're supported by their husband, an “employer” who pays them to stay at home.

The implication of this is probably obvious to 10-year-olds but seems incomprehensible to or is ignored by feminists and the liberal media: If millions of wives are able to accept NO wages, millions of other wives, whose husbands' incomes range from moderate to high, are able to:

-accept low wages
-refuse overtime and promotions
-choose jobs based on interest first, wages second — the reverse of what men tend to do
-take more unpaid days off
-avoid uncomfortable wage-bargaining (http://tinyurl.com/3a5nlay)
-work part-time instead of full-time

All of which lower women's median pay.

Women are able to make these choices because they are supported — or if unmarried anticipate being supported — by a husband who must earn more than if he'd chosen never to marry. (Still, even many men who shun marriage, unlike their female counterparts, feel their self worth is tied to their net worth.) This is how MEN help create the wage gap: as a group they pass up jobs that interest them for ones that pay well. If the roles were reversed so that men raised the children and women raised the income, men would average lower pay than women.

Points to ponder:

Why would "greedy, profit-obsessed" employers, many of whom where possible hire illegal immigrants for their cheap labor, pay men more than women for the same work? If employers could get away with that, they would not hire one man, ever.

The power in money is not in earning it (there is only responsibility, sweat, and stress in earning money). The power in money is in SPENDING it. And, Warren Farrell says in “The Myth of Male Power” at http://www.warrenfarrell.org/TheBook/index.html, "Women control consumer spending by a wide margin in virtually every consumer category." (Women's control over spending, adds Farrell, gives women control over TV programs.)

“There were fewer cases charging sex-based wage discrimination last year than the year before the [Ledbetter law] was signed, and the wage gap was wider in 2010 than it was in 2007.... The bottom line: In Obama’s first three years in office, the EEOC filed six gender-based wage discrimination lawsuits — down from 18 during Bush’s second term." -BusinessWeek, May 13, 2012, at http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-17/to-lure-womens-votes-obama-turns-to-lilly-ledbetter” and at http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-05-13/obama-pitches-equal-pay-to-win-women-even-as-charges-drop

The Fact Checker at the liberal Washington Post gives President Obama "One Pinocchio" for lying about the gender wage gap. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/the-white-houses-use-of-data-on-the-gender-wage-gap/2012/06/04/gJQAYH6nEV_blog.html

Excerpted from "Will the Ledbetter Act Help Women?" at http://malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/will-the-ledbetter-fair-pay-act-help-women/