I was feeling a little under the weather Monday, so there’s no fresh DJ for Tuesday. Instead, I offer this piece from March 2005. Unfortunately, it’s still timely.
RALEIGH – What’s the difference between equality and equity?
Don’t worry. You have not just begun the vocabulary portion of your standardized test. I ask the question because the answer has important public-policy implications. I also ask it because “pay equity” is among the causes that North Carolina Women United is championing Wednesday during its 2005 Advocacy Day at the General Assembly in Raleigh.
Webster’s defines “equal” as “of the same quantity, size, number, value, degree, intensity, quality, etc.” Thus equality refers to a state of sameness along these or other axes. The word “equity” is often used by some interchangeably with “equality,” but it shouldn’t be. The dictionary definition is “fairness, impartiality, justice.”
In the real world, the concepts of equality and equity not only aren’t synonymous but can yield entirely different conclusions. For example, say you get in a traffic accident on the way home this afternoon. Someone ran a red light and sideswiped you. Furthermore, say that your repair bill will be $400. Equality would suggest that the cost be shared with each driver paying $200. But equity would suggest that the other driver – or most likely his insurer – pay the entire $400 bill, since it was his fault.
According to the draft agenda for NC Women United, “pay equity” for women is already legally mandated by the Equal Pay Act of 1963. But “in reality, women’s earnings still lag behind men’s,” the organization states. It’s quite possible, however, for women and men to be treated equally with regard to compensation and for women’s earnings to lag behind men’s.
The reason is that women and men are not distributed evenly across professions, career aspirations, time commitments, and other categories related to their choices in life. When activists repeat the mantra that women earn only 76 cents for every $1 that men earn, they aren’t taking into consideration the complex calculations you would actually need to prove that women doing the same jobs, and planning the same career paths, as their male counterparts are getting stiffed due to their sex.
As columnist Steve Chapman has recently observed – though these statistics have been available for a long time – careful adjustments for age, education, experience, and other factors essentially erase the apparent wage gaps.
There is, in other words, pay equality for the most part in the U.S. That doesn’t mean there aren’t individual cases of discrimination. Of course there are. It also doesn’t necessarily mean that federal law generated this outcome. In a competitive market for labor, employers who let prejudices guide their decisions will lose out financially, as good employees go elsewhere.
Finally, pay equality still won’t strike some as equitable. They may want government to attempt to eliminate all disparities, including rational ones based on disparate individuals and circumstances. I’d urge them to consider the impossibility of such a task, and to consider the implications of a recent Census Bureau finding that similarly educated minority women are paid more than white women. Are employers biased in favor of white men and black women? Isn’t it more likely that something more complex, and more benign, is going on?
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.