Something I’ve been thinking about...

The reason why men drastically earned more than women back in the 20th century was mainly due to married men who were expected to work more hours than they usually do in order to secure money. Nothing unusual, it was just the culture at that time. According to Warren Farrell in his book “Why Mean Earn More”, he pointed out the the gap between unmarried working men and unmarried working women in 1950 in the US was 2%, so from that end I don’t see any form of discrimination.

Furthermore, I don’t understand the reason as to passing this legislation when the market was already incentivized to provide suitable wages based on one’s merit. If some jackass company decided to pay me less solely because of my identity and sex, what’s exactly stopping me from working with their competitor instead and possibly with a higher salary?

Finally, if the Equal Pay Act was enacted in June 10 1963, assuming it would be effective, the supposed pay gap should’ve started to close the following days, right? I mean, otherwise the lawsuits from women for underpayment on the basis of sex would start to pile up. And yet, if you take a look at this table, there wasn’t a considerable increase in women’s earnings (even dipping into the upper 50% in the 1970s) until the 1990s, where it surpassed 70%.

If you ask me, the Equal Pay Act was addressing a problem that didn’t exist and, well, as a law it didn’t even work! It only seems to me that it was used to justify more government control on the civilian’s usage of their money, and it’s entirely unethical.