Is There Equal Pay for Equal Work? Some Controversial Thoughts on an Uncontroversial Topic

One indicator the government monitors in our society is the "earnings gap" between men and women. Last fall, new figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the long rise in median weekly earnings of women employed full time stalled at 75% of men's median earnings. Having risen from 62¢ on the man's dollar, full-time women's weekly earnings had reached 77¢ in 1993, but in 1997 were stuck at 75¢.¹ Reminding us of the basic principle of equal pay for equal work, the Christian Science Monitor pointed out that the "real issue isn't that the numbers are going up or down, but that, 34 years after the Equal Pay Act was enacted, there is still a wage gap." The bottom line was that women weren't paid according to "responsibility and talent" but according to a "cultural bias against women workers" that companies needed to combat more vigorously.²

Can We Agree?

At last, a piece of news on which Christians and agnostics, complementarians and egalitarians can agree-or so it would seem. When complementarian Christians deal with controversial issues about men and women in society, we often erect a firewall to our right, by proclaiming that, of course we support equal pay for equal work.³ Curiously absent, though, is any Biblical discussion of the issue. Perhaps a debate went on in the years after equal pay for equal work became law in 1963, but if so, it has disappeared without a trace. Christian ethicists have given little reflection to what the Bible might say on this topic. This lack of debate is curious, since secular conservatives strongly reject the mainstream interpretation of the "60¢ on the dollar" slogans bandied about by feminists. Social scientist and columnist Thomas Sowell has pointed out that "equal pay for equal work" in practice means two quite different things: (1) either equal payment for employees, male or female, whose market value to the employer is equal, or (2) the idea that women, on average, ought to earn as much as men.⁴ Option 1 is equivalent to option 2 only if the two sexes are in fact equally productive in economic terms as an average of all the thousands of jobs they do. Only then, in an efficient labor market, should women's median pay equal men's median pay.

But isn't it true, argued the Christian Science Monitor, that "companies should value all their employees, women included"? If full-time women don't earn as much as fulltime men, aren't companies saying that they just don't value women equally? Clearly an equation is being set up here: companies that value women and men equally will give both sexes equal average salaries. If they reply that women's family roles, for example, result in lower productivity outside the home, aren't they expressing a "cultural bias" that undervalues women? Since women's work must be of equal value to men's, women's median earnings in any organization ought to be equal to men's, if the "equal pay for equal work is to be achieved. But what about productivity? Is any consideration of productivity simply a smokescreen to deny women equal worth in the work place?

Productivity Or Discrimination?

There are two possible explanations for the difference in median earnings between men and women: either men are for some reason more productive and thus their labor has greater market value or else employers (or "society") pervasively discriminate against women. Mainstream commentators see the possibility of men and women's productivity being different as unthinkable. Hence they see women earning on average 75¢ to the men's dollar as a serious problem needing further enforcement of civil rights laws, further soul-searching by employers, and further government intervention in the labor market. But is there empirical evidence to decide between the two alternatives?

As Thomas Sowell points out, the evidence shows that the key issue here is not sex itself, but the interaction of sex and marital status. In general, when men marry, their engagement in paid labor and their earnings go up, but when women marry, their engagement in paid labor and their earnings go down. The relatively higher earnings of single women are reflected widely in the statistical record. Thus, in 1982 single women earned 91¢ on the single man's dollar. In 1971, women who had remained single into their thirties and worked since high school actually had higher median earnings than men of the same description and so on.⁵ Thus, if employers are bucking the law, they are doing so only against married women, something that is hard to believe. Women's lower average pay is linked to choices they make, specifically the choice to get married.

Choices Women Make

The solution to this puzzle and the key to evaluating how social policy affects families is to realize that most wives and mothers forego some or all of their possible income, in order to boost the continuity of employment, and hence earnings, of their husbands. Even if married women go back to work full-time after the children are older, the temporary lower engagement in the labor force leaves its mark in lost seniority, experience, etc. Most women in past decades, and many still today, prepared for jobs that do not require heavy time commitments in prime child-bearing years, and do not harshly penalize periodic withdrawal from the labor force. They tend to become nurses not doctors, or study English, not math.⁶ Conversely, few college- educated career women successfully combine career and motherhood. Harvard professor Claudia Goldin (a distinguished cliometrician, and a divorced, childless woman) has shown that half of the women who graduated from college in 1910 never had children. For college graduates in 1972, the numbers are not very different; only 13 to 17% have both children and a career and about half of those with careers are childless.⁷

These choices, linked to women's biological role as wives and mothers, make them less productive than men in the paid work force. Employers pay the market price, no more or less, for women's labor. If the "gender gap" was simply the result of discrimination against equally productive workers, then an incentive would exist for employers to fire all the men and use only the equally productive, but lower paid, women workers. Market behavior shows that such opportunities have not been pursued and hence that discrimination on such a wide scale is also unlikely to exist.

Scripture Speaks

But what does the Bible say about all this? Is it silent on the issue of "gender equity"? Or does it condemn the above arguments as the kind of "worldly or pagan devices designed to make women feel inferior for being female"⁸ that progressive Christians have been trained to expect from secular conservatives and those Christians undiscerning enough to associate with them?

Quite the opposite. As reviewed above, the mainstream feminist argument, now accepted by America's leading institutions, says that equal respect for the worth of women means equal pay for equal work, which in turn means equal median earnings for men and women. The Bible, however, clearly refutes both sides of this argument. It states quite clearly that under proper conditions the average labor of certain classes-the old, women, children-is worth less money than that of adult men. But it likewise shows that social worth or divine approval is not determined by these differences.

In Leviticus 27, God gives rules for a household head who vows to dedicate a person under him to God. Dedication of a gift involves its complete separation from common uses and, for living creatures, its destruction. Since God abominates human sacrifice, He requires redemption of that vow, evidently according to the actual and prospective labor that the vow-maker would lose if the person so dedicated were destroyed. God proclaims the proper values in vv. 3-8, according to age and sex:

As we can see, the ratios for the redemption of females range from 50% to 67% of that of men, and the ratio for adults, undoubtedly the majority of cases applied under this law, is 60%.

The issue here is not equal respect or social worth. Elders are redeemed at a lower rate than the young, despite God's categorical command for the young to reverence the aged (Lev. 19:32; Prov. 20:29; 1 Tim. 5:1). Thus the Bible, contrary to the Christian Science Monitor, does not agree that social worth is measured by earnings. The Biblical passage in question distinguishes between labor value and social worth. While valuing a person's labor in practical terms, it uses a different scale to measure a person's worth and legitimate prestige. Nor do the varying labor values described in Leviticus 27 negate the equal worth of souls before God. This God makes clear by demanding a half-shekel to redeem the souls of each adult, regardless of wealth (Ex. 30:11-16). In this way God taught the Israelites that each person is equally worthy before Him. The sole issue in the redemption of vows, as Lev. 27:8 makes clear, is the value of the dedicated person's labor to the vow-maker.

Applying Biblical Truth

How can we apply this passage today? Should women always be paid 60% of what a men makes? Such a conclusion would read too much into the passage. The specific ratios of labor value given in Leviticus 27 depend on the economy involved. The valuation probably involved field labor, from which women would be often disabled by pregnancy and nursing, and in which men's greater strength would be vital. It is quite possible that in a mechanized economy, women's unskilled labor productivity is much closer to that of men. On the other hand, in a highly skilled economy, lengthy education and rapid change in techniques may increase the penalty for intermittent withdrawals from full-time study and/or the paid labor force. No automatic rule can be derived for societies today.

Even with these cautions in mind, the conclusion is still clear: unequal average earnings between men and women are not necessarily illegitimate according to Scripture. Given the expected differences in productivity outside the home, societies in which the average woman earns 60¢ on the average man's dollar are not by that fact alone violating God's will. Pay scales and human worth are not the same. One can equally respect classes of people while still valuing their labor unequally either as individuals or on average. Thus, the fundamental equation (that equal respect for men and women means equal pay for equal work which in turn means equal median earnings for men and women) in mainstream policy on "gender equity" among government policy-makers, universities, the media, and many businesses runs up against the basic assumptions of Leviticus 27.

The passage's relevance today is thus both negative and positive. Negatively, it shows us that no claims about injustice can be drawn solely from figures comparing average earnings of men and women. It means that we should not rush to condemn countries, institutions, or employers simply for paying women differently, on average, from men. Positively, given the household roles that married women take on, it creates a presumption that men overall will have higher productivity outside the home than women, a difference we ought to find reflected in wages. The ratio for adults given in Leviticus 27 (30 to 50, or 60%) is found in many societies.⁹

When the Chinese commune system in the 1950s set out to value the average productivity of field labor, a full day's work of a mature man was valued at ten points while a day's work of women and older people received six to eight points.¹⁰ The ratio of the sexes' labor-value in basic agricultural labor is nearly identical to that in Leviticus. The ratio is also close to the almost three-fifths ratio that held true for many decades up to 1979 in the United States,¹¹ or the 55.8% ratio between women's and men's wages in Japan recorded in 1977.¹²

Where Are We Headed?

Whence, then, the recent rise in women's earnings in the U.S. and other Western countries, that move us away from the ratios in Leviticus 27? It is likely related to the steady decline in family and household size,¹³ reflecting a decrease in the proportion of women pursuing a home-centered life. This decrease is itself explainable by changing values, increasing divorce, and stagnation of male wages. The "gender gap" has narrowed more by declining men's earnings than by rising women's earnings. From 1979 to 1995, the median annual earnings of men dropped 11.5% while those of women rose only half that percentage. At the same time, expansion of the welfare safety-net made it easier for wives to bail out (or be pushed out) of unsatisfactory marriages and set up new households. These changes in turn make a home-centered life-choice less attractive for girls, who have responded by entering traditionally male fields that are less forgiving of intermittent involvement in paid labor. It may also be influenced by ideologically-motivated adjustments in earnings of men and women, particularly in less market-sensitive areas such as government, media, academia, and some sectors of large corporations.¹⁴

So where does this leave "equal pay for equal work" as a general principle? Certainly nothing in Scripture prevents employers from paying men and women equally for the same job. Whether general principles of fairness require such strict equality is a separate question, one I am not here addressing. In any case, this simple rule will find smaller and smaller area for application in the modern labor market, where earnings are increasingly based not on broad job descriptions but upon ever more sophisticated systems of bonuses and merit-pay.

But one must distinguish such individual application from the statistical comparison of men's and women's median earnings, whether on a national scale, or within a corporation or other large organization. Such comparisons inevitably encourage policies that hurt families where the wife specializes in household labor and builds up her husband's earnings. Respectable feminists, not just the "radicals", have been urging since the 1920's that in a just society, women's median earnings must equal men's.

The leaders in American government, media, academia, and much of industry have now accepted this long-standing feminist principle. To them, the advantage a married man secures as his wife's homemaking enables him to work more productively is ultimately a kind of unfair discrimination. To secure "equal pay for equal work" they must therefore deny married men the increase in earnings that their increased productivity would otherwise earn them and which they rely on to finance their wives' lesser involvement in paid labor. If the resulting drop in their husbands' income forces more married women to enter the paid labor force, then so be it: "equal pay for equal work" will come that much closer.

Conclusion: No Agreement

To return to Sowell's distinctions mentioned at the beginning of this article, equal payment for employees, male or female, whose market value to the employer is equal is a very different thing from the idea that women, on average, ought to earn as much as men. As much as one might wish it were not so, "equal pay for equal work" as a legal principle, however, means the second principle, not the first. Anyone concerned with the long term viability of homemaking as a practical option for ordinary families cannot afford to agree with egalitarians on this version of "equal pay for equal work."