- Position‹2 of 2
- Women should vote for Biden
The argument
The argument begins by establishing the size and the reach of the problem it proposes to address. For every dollar a man makes, the average woman makes 82 cents, with Black women earning 62 cents, Native women earning 57 cents, and Latinas earning 54 cents. For a woman who works full time, year round, that's a gap of more than $10,000 annually. The gap is also persistent rather than situational: it starts when women first start working and continues into retirement, no matter the woman's education level or occupation, which is what distinguishes it from a difference attributable to any particular career choice. It can exacerbate other biases too, with a greater impact on women of color, transgender women, women with disabilities, and immigrant women. The remedy proposed is disclosure rather than direct regulation of pay, and the reasoning is that a disparity cannot be addressed while it remains invisible. The Democratic Administration required medium and large employers to collect and disclose compensation information by race, gender, and ethnicity to the federal government, which would provide better insight into pay disparities. Data of that kind identifies which employers and occupations account for the gap, information that neither regulators nor employees otherwise hold. The contrast between the candidates is presented as a contrast over that data. The Trump Administration has announced its intent to stop collecting pay data for future years, which would remove the measurement rather than the disparity. Biden believes improving pay transparency is essential to ending the gender pay gap and will enforce this as President. On this reading the choice is between an administration that would keep the reporting requirement and one that has moved to end it, which is why proponents argue that women should vote for Biden.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Critics respond that the headline '82 cents on the dollar' is an unadjusted comparison of all men's and all women's earnings, not a measure of unequal pay for the same work. Much of the raw gap reflects differences in occupation, industry, hours worked and time out of the workforce; studies that control for those factors find the gap for comparable roles far smaller. On that view, a federal pay-data reporting requirement targets a figure that is largely explained by other causes. Opponents of the reporting rule argued it was burdensome and of limited use to enforcement, which is why it was paused — not out of hostility to equal pay. They also note that equal pay for equal work is already illegal, so the argument overstates how much a transparency rule would change and leans a whole voting decision on a single administrative policy.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Critics argue the 82-cent figure is an unadjusted aggregate that largely reflects differences in field, hours and experience, not employer discrimination for equal work. [Rejecting P2] They dispute that mandatory pay-data reporting is 'essential' to closing the gap, calling it a blunt, burdensome instrument of unproven effect, given equal-pay law already exists. [Rejecting P3] The suspension of data collection was defended as a cost-versus-utility judgement, so casting it as proof of opposition to closing the gap is contested.