Rose Mary Meyer of The Women’s Office (Voice, March 16) complains that women’s pay averages 26 percent less than men’s. She implies that the “pay gap” is due to prejudice against women, and ignores any other possible reasons.
One such reason might be that many women take time off to raise children and thus fall behind men in work experience and seniority. Another might be that relatively few women go into the highly paid scientific and engineering fields.
If such factors do not account for the “pay gap,” then we must conclude that most employers let their prejudice against women override their normal greed for profits.
Consider: If an employer can get away with paying a woman 74 cents for work that he would have to pay a man $1 for, then greed dictates that he hire as many women as possible. He should hire men at $1 only when he absolutely cannot scrape up any more women to work at 74 cents.
Therefore the unemployment rate for women should be much lower than for men because hardly anyone would hire high-paid men as long as he could hire low-paid women instead. But this is not what we see in the real world.
