Earlier today, the Senate HELP (Health Education Labor Pension) committee held a hearing on the vital need to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. The committee’s ranking member, Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) proclaimed in his opening remarks:

A study released last year found that if you factor in observable choices such as part time work, seniority and occupational choice, the pay gap stands between 5 to 7 percent. I believe the best way to address that gap is by encouraging women to enter higher earning fields.

The career choices we all make impact our earnings, and data shows that women are more likely to select fields that pay less. There are many reasons one might make such a choice, including schedule flexibility, job security and the quality of fringe benefits such as health, retirement and childcare. I, for one, would never question the logic of making such a tradeoff. In fact, economists have noted that the current economic downturn has had a harsher effect in traditionally male occupations and the unemployment rate for men has been a full 2 percentage points above that for women throughout the recession.

Yet, to the extent that women may not enter traditionally male fields precisely because they have been traditionally male, they may not be earning to their full potential.

In other words, there really isn’t a wage gap and, if there is, it’s women’s own fault because we have chosen the wrong careers, opted to work part-time or flexible schedules, or had the audacity to take advantage of our well-earned employee benefits. What was the most incredible about Sen. Enzi’s statement that if women just made different career choices they could make as much money as men. While he backed up his words with a concrete plan of action to help more women get job training for predominately male-dominated fields, Sen. Enzi is mistaken if he thinks it is that simple.

Today, in 2010, a woman can get training and become an on-the-road (OTR) truck driver, welder or electrical engineer. However, her grandmother could not have tried to get a job at a construction site in 1920. She would have been laughed at and told to go work at a diner, where she would have earned a tiny fraction of the construction worker’s wages. Likewise, a woman in the 1950s could not have gotten a job as a plumber. She, too, would have been laughed at and told to go a clerk in a grocery store. Even today, there are countless families in which the husband works in construction, manufacturing, plumbing, engineering, medicine, information technology, education (and on and on and on) and the wife works at Wal-Mart. It happens every single day.

Both the husband and wife work 40 hours a week (or more). They both work hard at their jobs. One just happens to earn a heck of a lot more money.

That, my friends, is what you call a wage gap. It hurts real women, men and families – even in Wyoming, Sen. Enzi.

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