Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. Consistently opposed legal and legislative attempts to strengthen women's rights during his years as a legal adviser in the Reagan White House, disparaging what he called "the purported gender gap" and, at one point, questioning "whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good."Horrors!
This interpretation of Roberts' record rests mainly on two things. One was an opinion he wrote about a White House staff member entering a Clairol shampoo contest for women who had changed their lives after 30. The woman in this case had gotten a law degree and "encouraged many former homemakers to enter law school and become lawyers."
Roberts' wrote that he did not see any conflicts with a staff member entering the contest but "Some might question whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good, but I suppose that is for the judges to decide."
This is a lawyer joke, not a statement that women are only fit to be homemakers. Anyone reading it any other way is deliberately trying to find fault (which is what a number of groups have to do in order to justify years of fund-raising).
The other main point has to do with comparable worth. In the late 1970s and 1980s, feminists could no longer complain about women earning less when doing the same job. Studies indicated that women's earnings were quickly approaching men's when comparing people doing the same job with the same experience. But women, on the average, were earning less then men.
Studies were done ranking professions based on specific criteria to identify jobs with similar requirements. They found that professions typically held by women such as health care, child care, and elementary education paid less than male professions such as truck drivers, parking lot attendants, and vocational educators.
Obviously (to them), discrimination was at work. They wanted the government to step in and force employers to raise women's wages. Roberts was against this.
Good! It was a stupid idea. It would have put all wages under government control on a level unseen anywhere except communist countries.
Also, the studies were flawed, or more precisely, the results were cooked. Jobs were ranked based on education, training, stress, customer or client contact, and responsibility. While education and training are objective measures, stress and responsibility are not. Also missing are flexible hours, physical effort, and danger.
Look at elementary educator vs. Vocational educator. At first glance these seem equivalent. Both are teachers. But a vocational teacher has to be qualified in a specialized trade, often automobile mechanic. These are in short supply so schools have to pay more to attract them. In contrast, what else can an elementary educator do? Plus, there is often a glut of elementary teachers. Paying them as much as auto mechanics will just make the glut worse and will not help with the chronic shortage of mechanics. That's how the free market operates.
Most women's groups such as the NOW are on the far left of the Democratic Party. They still would like a government takeover of wages. The rest of the country dismissed it in the 1980s.
Keep this in mind when evaluating Roberts' anti-women opinions.
Now, the real question: why would the Washington Post put such a pro-feminist spin on the story? Don't they realize how out-of-the-mainstream comparable worth is? Roberts' opinion is right in the center of current law.
Could the MSM be just a little bit biased?
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