Idaho pays women
‘stoop labor’ wages
Commentary by
PAT MURPHY
Ah, sweet
silence from Idaho’s political and business establishments when another
infamy was added to the list of unneeded honors.
The Census
Bureau reports that Idaho working women are paid less than in other states
— averaging about $12,500 a year, or half what men are paid.
How can
this be when workplace equality supposedly is de rigueur?
Simple.
Women who need income will endure this slight, and employers who choose so
will pay what they can get away with, since Idaho’s male-dominated
establishment seems satisfied with its attitudes toward women.
A few
hemmers and hawers blame an anomaly — Idaho women quit work to have a
family or work part-time.
Surprise:
women in other states also quit jobs to have families or work part-time.
If I seem
especially intense about this, it’s because of a special admiration for
working women, especially those who juggle homes and work.
I saw my
mother raise two sons and work full-time while my father was in and out of
veterans’ hospitals with World War I injuries. When she dropped dead at
83 years old after a full week in the office, she’d worked for the same
company for 59 years, rising from clerk to vice president.
A woman,
Verna Burke, gave me my first flying lesson at 14 in a Florida pasture. I
took commercial and instrument flight tests from a woman FAA examiner,
Mary Gaffaney, then the world’s champion aerobatics pilot whom men
refused to compete against.
As a
newspaper publisher, many of my editors and my executive assistant were
women because of exemplary skills. My boss until her retirement was a
woman, Nina Pulliam, widow of the newspaper’s founder, who had helped
build the nation’s 17th and 18th largest morning
and evening newspapers.
I recently
completed a magazine profile of Barbara Barrett, wife of the CEO of
chip-maker Intel, but also one of the most widely traveled American
businesswomen-lawyers who’s met upwards of 100 of the world’s
political leaders and just ended a two-year term as president of the
International Women’s Forum. She also was a Reagan appointee — No. 2
at the now disbanded Civil Aeronautics Board, No. 2 at the Federal
Aviation Administration, as well as a Defense Department adviser on women
in the military. As a teenager, she supported a widowed mother and five
siblings, then earned three degrees in college.
My spouse
was a successful real estate broker in Arizona.
Over the
years, I’ve watched women move rapidly into so-called men’s
traditional fields — airline jet captains and military combat pilots,
astronauts, physicians, politicians in city, state and national office;
judges; presidential Cabinet members, even presidential and vice
presidential candidates. One of the U.S. Air Force’s select U-2 spy
plane pilots is a woman. The first female U.S. Supreme Court associate
justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, was an Arizona state senator when I first
met her in 1972.
And so it
goes with remarkable women, despite obstacles that would discourage lesser
men.
Part of the
problem for Idaho women may be that a discredited Stone Age philosophy
survives — that women belong at home, not in the work place.
If Gov.
Dirk Kempthorne truly believes Idaho has a special place in the sun, as he
preaches, he needs to lecture employers about the virtues and values of
paying women their worth, not stoop labor wages.