Paycheck Fairness Act

April 20th has been designated by some NGOs as Equal Pay Day. Keep your eye on the status of the Paycheck Fairness Act as we move closer to April 20th. April 20th was selected as these groups contend that, for the average full-time female employee to earn the same amount of money as the average male employee, said average female employee would need to work nearly four additional months – until the third week of April – on account of an alleged 23% gender gap.

The House of Commons in London last week enacted a similar piece of legislation. A state-written summary of The Equality Act 2010 is available here. The actual law is some 251 pages in length.

WSJ in its Weekend Edition here discusses all of this as well as competing studies on the pay gap between men and women. Interesting research by two Cornell University economists, Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn, who concluded that the “unexplained” gender gap, as of 1998, was 9%.

You can view my paper on the Paycheck Fairness Act here and my prior blog post on the Act here.