Thoughts on equal pay

What should determine how much people should be paid? In short, pay should be based on the value of the work provided. If men and women are doing the same job with comparable performance, they should be paid comparable wages.

One thing that keeps coming up is that men and women, on average, make differing amounts of money. These arguments can be misleading since they don't try to explain why. Instead, they push the assumption that it's due to discriminatory practices.

I'm not going to go down that path. Let's just assume for now that this assumption is correct. This would clearly be wrong. How do we address it?

There's no easy answer to this question. If they are truly doing equal work, it would probably correct itself eventually. If businesses can pay less for the same work, they would more actively pursue the workers asking for less. This would increase demand for female workers. This demand would result in higher pay. Eventually, wages should converge.

That's not the solution that most of us seem to want. Instead, we are demanding government intervention. Unfortunately, there are serious problems with this approach. By forcing businesses to look at gender when setting wages, you are forcing them to focus less on the actual value of work.

Government intervention undermines the ability to base wages on the value of the work performed. They are not evaluating each and every worker in America. That would require full-blown socialism. The only way to guarantee equal pay based on gender is to devalue the work performed.

If we want men and women to be paid equally for the same work, it needs to be the employers taking charge. They are the ones who should know the value of their employees. They are the ones that can establish pay based on the value of the work rather than gender. By contrast, the government is judging solely on the basis of gender.