R: Realistic & Fair Wages

Equal Pay Day, a public awareness event to illustrate the gap between men's and women's wages, will take place this week. As many of you already know, this year, each of us has a unique opportunity to take action and a make a meaningful difference in the fight for fair pay.

Time magazine recently dedicated a cover to education. Despite my time helping start a Spanish immersion school and writing about education, I found so much of it eye-opening, starting with the controversy around merit pay for teachers.

Written by Nanette Fondas and Katie Bethell

A stay-at-home mother doesn't get a paycheck, so she might wonder if the Fair Pay Restoration Act impacts her life. At first glance it appears not, but a closer look shows that it does affect her and that all moms -- regardless of their stay-at-home or working mother status -- would be wise to support it.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a major step forward for equality in our country. It leveled the playing field for tens of thousands of workers and opened the door to new opportunities. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s Ledbetter decision has become a road block to the workplace equality that Congress intended to achieve with the Civil Rights Act more than 40 years ago.

Reading the stories by so many moms about how they have been discriminated against at the workplace is unsettling at best and horrifying at worst, but it’s not surprising.

Although I’m not a fan of trickle-down economic theory I’ve always believed that when women advance into positions of authority in the work world – pay and other conditions for women at those same companies (and in those job sectors) should eventually improve.

Leslie Bennetts' new book "The Feminine Mistake" has generated a lot of controversy and discussion. I expected to be the last person to defend her, as I was personally offended by Bennetts' overly critical characterization of stay-at-home Moms. She operates with a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel, but her core message is unmistakably important: A man is not a financial plan. Every woman needs to wake up to this reality. The cost of being caught without a personally-constructed safety net is a stiff penalty.

I am not surprised that a book as polarizing as "The Feminine Mistake" has generated a lot of love-it-or-hate-it reactions, but I have been taken aback by the willful financial denial voiced in some of the Amazon.com reader reviews. A woman calling herself Starbaby says....

If we want to understand the wage gap between mothers and others, we might need to start by looking at the way we treat our kids. A new University of Michigan study, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, reports that boys ages 10 to 18 are more likely than girls to be paid for doing housework, even though boys spend an average of 30% less time doing chores.

According to the WSJ, Professor Frank Stafford, who headed the resrarch, speculates that "Boys may be handling more of the kinds of chores that are regarded as a job that should be paid, such as lawnmowing. Chores such as dishwashing or cooking, often regarded as routine and done free, may fall more often to girls."

UPDATE: The Senate may vote on this issue within the next 24 hours. Please call your Senators and let them know what you think about linking a hike in the minimum wage to a cut in the estate tax.
BACKGROUND: Just before leaving for their summer recess, the House passed a bill that would raise the federal hourly minimum wage from $5.25 to $7.25 over three years - but the other provisions in the bill make it very unlikely that it will pass the Senate.