LETTER: Obama is wrong about gender gap
To the editor:
In his State of the Union address, President Obama claimed: “(Women) make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns,” and that “in 2014, it’s an embarrassment” to our country. Though a wage gap may exist, Obama’s judgment of our country is completely wrong. The wage gap is actually an indicator of our country’s family values.
Obama ignores the fact that women of today didn’t plan on a lifetime of work and they didn’t prepare themselves to earn six figures a year like their male counterparts, but that they were preparing themselves for a life no less noble than that of business executive or an engineer. They were planning on becoming mothers. They were planning on raising the future of America.
As women prepared to become mothers, they took different paths than men. It wouldn’t make sense for a woman to invest her time and energy in becoming an engineer if soon after graduation she was going to take 10 years off to be a mother. A woman couldn’t work 70 hours a week at a law firm, take a break to raise a family and then return and expect to become a partner at the law firm. Women planned to have employment gaps throughout their careers. These gaps in employment explain much of the wage gap which our president calls an embarrassment.
All through middle school and high school, the greatest motivation for doing well is to be able to go to school, get good grades and get a good job. If young women of the 1970s only “revised their expectations” in their late teens, it was already too late. They simply couldn’t get the same jobs or university degrees as the men who had been preparing to work since childhood. Goldin’s findings are confirmed in an article published on economist.com. The article explains that it wasn’t until the 1980s that women began graduating from college at the same rate as men, and even then these women were graduating with lower paying degrees in education and childhood development.
Now I would ask, Mr. President, is it so bad that women chose to raise families? Is it so bad that they invested their lives in building strong families? When you shouted: “I firmly believe when women succeed, America succeeds,” were you implying that women have not succeeded in their roles?
Your mother would be ashamed of you.
– Josh Richards