This morning at 9 a.m. Sen. Hillary Clinton was scheduled to appear at a National Press Club Press conference to celebrate "Equal Pay Day 2006."
But she was a no show.
Maybe it was just too early to join her fellow sponsors of the Paycheck Fairness Act to bridge the percieved gap between men and women's pay.
What excuses would she have? Her job had duties more important than helping women everywhere achieve "equal status"? Aren't women's rights human rights, after all? What else, she couldn't pick out the right pantsuit? By her own standards, there's not a lot of justification for the good senator missing this one.
A legitimate excuse might be that her daugther was sick and needed her care-the real reason most women often stay home from work. They're "pro-choice," free to choose their families or their career-or if they're lucky, a mix of both. Most women, when confronted between work or caring for a loved one, would duck out of a presser.
Independent Women's Forum released a statement that said "Warren Farrell — a former board member of the National Organization for Women's New York chapter — identifies 25 decisions that individuals make when choosing jobs in his book, Why Men Earn More. Women, he finds, are much more likely to make decisions that increase their quality of life, but decrease their pay. Most people understand that many women often take time out of the workforce to care for family members, particularly young children. Even women who work full-time log fewer hours in the office on average than full-time working men. It is common sense that a worker who remains employed continually is going to make more than someone who drops out of the workforce for several years."
And, like Hillary showed us, she's a woman of choice. She stayed home.
