I need YOUR help! (please)

[Live-Wire]

I'm writing an essay on the following premise.

 

The entire point of the US government is a representative republican government, but for some reason up until 1965 (voting rights act) this WASNT TRUE. Even in 1960 far less than half the people in the country could vote, so how is it possibly a government of the people?

 

Anyway - i have to prove 2 things:

 

1) this was a seemingly unsolvable quandary (problem) and many people TRIED to solve it. For this, i need examples of congress, individuals, or whoever trying to force the south (and others) to have equal voting rights ... and FAILING. I need plenty of evidence (give me laws, acts, whatever) of why people kept trying to solve this and COULDNT.

 

2) the person who finally SOLVED this quandary for Earl Warren, through his personal brilliance (him as a person). Don't worry about this as much ... I can handle it... I know earl warren like the back of my hand. I'm more worried about proving that this was an unsolvable quandry BY ANYONE ELSE.

 

 

 

Anyway here is my start .... its crappy and unrevised .... dont get on me about that.... remember i have to prove that this was a nearly unsolvable quandry, and that the chief architect in solving it was Earl Warren. (i made up the essay topic, so forget the fact that I could be *wrong* )

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the establishment of their cons!@#$%^&*ution, up until 1966, the United States dealt with the seemingly unsolvable quandary of their supposedly republican cons!@#$%^&*utional government instead being a government of partial and unequal representation. It was Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, who was the chief architect in orchestrating the move towards a real Republic in the U.S. His brilliance lay in his ability to skirt the authority of the Cons!@#$%^&*ution as a means to his ends. With his rulings in key court cases, culminating with the upholding of the cons!@#$%^&*utionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in South Carolina v. Katzenback (1966), he overstepped usual boundaries on the Supreme Court because he knew drastic, and perhaps uncons!@#$%^&*utional, measures were required to solve the quandary. Previous attempts to rectify the issues of apportionment, white primaries, grandfather clauses, poll taxes, and literacy tests had been sound in theory, but failed in practice, until Chief Justice Warren and the other justices of the Warren Era made their first important decision on the issue, in 1962, with Baker v. Carr.

The most important premise, and basic notion, of the Cons!@#$%^&*ution of the United States is that the government is ruled by the people. From the creation of that do-*BAD WORD*-ent, and for over 150 following years, the government of the United States did not represent the people. The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments expressly made changes in the Cons!@#$%^&*ution to provide for equal voting rights, yet even in 1960 the percentage of voting-age whites in Mississippi was 63.9%, while the percentage of voting-age blacks was 5.2%. In Alabama, 63.6% compared to 13.7%. In South Carolina, 57.1% compared to 13.7%. Infact, the average percentages of all the Southern states showed a difference of 61.1% to 29.2% . Between the ratification of these amendments in 1865, 1868, and 1870 respectively, countless attempts were made by the North in Congress, and other Supreme Courts before the Warren Court, to prevent the South from excluding minority voters, but the South used the shield of the Guarantee Clause (Section 4, Article 3) of the Cons!@#$%^&*ution to skirt the mandates of the Federal Government. The quandary seemed unsolvable. When Congress made it illegal to bar blacks from voting, the South created what are called, in popular terms, the Jim Crow laws, which completed worked around three cons!@#$%^&*utional amendments. Early in the history of the Jim Crow laws were the grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and poll taxes. Grandfather clauses prevented you from voting if your grandfather couldn’t vote. Since many former-slaves and young Black-Americans had grandparents who were slaves, and therefore unable by law to vote, they were barred from voting. This didn’t specifically target blacks, though, so the Federal Government seemingly remained powerless. Likewise, literacy tests were required in some States to vote. Many blacks were illiterate, or had trouble answering questions that were geared to the dialects and popular phrases of whites, and were therefore barred from voting. Poll taxes also kept the poor from voting.

Later, white primaries were used to keep minorities out of politics. Since the two major political parties were private clubs, they could allow only whites to run in their groups. Since only members of the two parties had any chance at all of winning elections, that meant there were no minorities in politics. This quandary seemed unsolvable. Congress made attempts to fix the problem, but they were largely unsuccessful, as the data from 1960 suggests.

[Bacchus]

I'd very much like to help but this is beyond me, sorry LW.

[Yupa]

it was a representative government - just not representing everyone it governed

[Live-Wire]

Okay I totally redid the first half of the essay .... First half = proving it was a seemingly unsolvable quandary. Second half will be about why Warren solved it. Here is first half. Unfortunately, literally like 1/4 of the essay is written in the footnotes, and i cant cut and paste them here oh well

 

 

 

 

From the establishment of their cons!@#$%^&*ution, up until 1966, the United States dealt with the seemingly unsolvable quandary of their supposedly cons!@#$%^&*utional representative democracy instead being a government of partial and unequal representation, or even an oligarchy. It was Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, who was the chief architect in orchestrating the move towards a real Republic in the U.S. His brilliance lay in his ability to skirt the authority of the Cons!@#$%^&*ution as a means to his ends, despite questions over the legality of his actions. With his rulings in key court cases, culminating with the upholding of the cons!@#$%^&*utionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in South Carolina v. Katzenback (1966), he overstepped boundaries on the Supreme Court because he knew drastic, and perhaps uncons!@#$%^&*utional, measures were required to solve the quandary. Previous attempts to rectify the issues of an un-republican government by Congress and previous Courts had been sound in theory, but failed in practice, until Chief Justice Warren and the other justices of the Warren Era made their first important decisions on the issue, in 1954, with Brown v. Board of Education and, in 1962, with Baker v. Carr.

The most important premise, and basic notion, of the Cons!@#$%^&*ution of the United States is that the government is ruled by the people. From the creation of that do-*BAD WORD*-ent, and for over 150 following years, the government of the United States did not represent the people – it represented an elite class, originally of aristocratic landowning white males, who comprised of an unbelievably small percentage of the population. The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments expressly made changes in the Cons!@#$%^&*ution to provide for equal voting rights to create a true Republic, yet even in 1960 the percentage of voting-age whites in Mississippi was 63.9%, while the percentage of voting-age blacks was 5.2%. In Alabama, 63.6% compared to 13.7%. In South Carolina, 57.1% compared to 13.7%. Indeed, the average percentages of all the Southern states showed a difference of 61.1% to 29.2%. The 13th amendment outlawed slavery, the 14th established “equal protection of the laws” and intended to create fair apportionment, and the 15th amendment indicated that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude.” Why then, despite these amendments to the foundation of the U.S. government, were they largely ineffectual? The quandary was mind-numbing to politicians in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The South created what are called, in popular terms, the Jim Crow laws, which completely worked around these three cons!@#$%^&*utional amendments, using the shield of Section 4, Article 3 of the cons!@#$%^&*ution, which guaranteed the States a republican form of government (Guarantee Clause) and the 10th amendment, which reserved the powers not given to the federal government, to the states. Grandfather clauses , literacy tests , poll taxes , white primaries , and even outright physical prevention of blacks from voting, were policies and laws used by the South to avoid following the cons!@#$%^&*utional representative democracy of the U.S. Later, movement in population upset the balance of representation in many States: In Tennessee in 1901, 43,000 voters lived in the urban district that included Memphis, which received 7.5 representatives. 11 representatives belonged to every other district combined, who combined to have the same population. In 1950, 312,000 voters lived in the district that included urban Memphis, which still received 7.5 representatives, since they had not reapportioned. The other districts combined to the same population, yet received 26 representatives, because more districts had been added. If you lived in rural Tennessee in 1950, your vote counted nearly 4 times as much as if you lived in urban Memphis. States defended their right to keep apportionment because the Cons!@#$%^&*ution reserved them that right under the 10th amendment, and they were right, as pre-Warren Supreme Court rulings grudgingly admitted.

Congress and the Executive made attempts to fix the quandary of unequal representation, but they were largely unsuccessful. The Freedmen’s Bureau was set up in 1865 by executive order, and Reconstruction imposed military power over the southern states, but the extreme leniency of reconstructionist policies from President Johnson following Lincoln largely undermined any ability to make Reconstruction work. Violence against blacks was rampant in the South during this time. In 1937-1938, Congress passed anti-lynching and poll tax bills, but the effects did little to increase black participation in voting due to the simple threat of violence for defying local white authorities, who literally blocked the entrance to voting booths from blacks. Education is one of the highest correlations to desire-to-vote among voting-age citizens, but segregation in education lead to worse education for blacks. During WWII, Mississippi blacks comprise 57% of the school-age population, but received only 13% of the education budget. New Deal plans attempted to bring aid to the poor south (largely black), but simply opened the South to the harsh reality of industrial capitalism; there are winners, and there are losers (and in this case, the South was losing). “There was … no such thing as an entirely healthy, homogeneous and united black community anywhere in the United States during the early twentieth century.” This lack of cohesion in a political system largely driven by the power of collective action and money of interest groups held Black-Americans from breaking out of the history of undemocratic America, preventing the true Republic that the United States claimed to have. That is, until Earl Warren began to solve the unsolvable quandary.

[SVS]

It blows

[MonteZuma]

OK My foreigners take on this.........

 

The false premise is that the USA has a purely representative government. No nation does. I'd point out the low voter turnouts that exist in the US today and the fact, for example, that prisoners and young people can't vote. Nobody wants a purely representative government. Back in 1965 people in some states wanted a representative government even less than they do now.

 

It would be interesting to compare voter turn out in those affected states prior, during and after debate about voting rights began to see if the federal government is any more representative today than it was then. A counter argument to my way of looking at this might be that although the proportion of voters might have fluctuated, the proportion of 'eligible' voters has obviously increased. But does this really matter? The argument remains that a government elected by only a portion of the population is not representative.

 

Monte

 

$0.02

[Yupa]

as far as I know 'pure democracy' was first used on a large scale in Athens - but even then I'm pretty sure it was just males, males that were citizens

 

anyways, so true, so true - all people should not be allowed to vote

 

need logic tests/psych evalutations, etc.

 

edit:ack, let's not get off topic

[Live-Wire]

montezuma ... let me finish .... i have some really cool data for you

[MonteZuma]

Cool bananas live. I'm all ears/eyes. Good luck with your essay.

 

Oh...btw....I think that the Act in 1965 was a great thing and that it addressed a huge problem. Australia had similar, maybe even bigger issues regarding voting rights for Aboriginals...which were addressed by referendum at about the same time. I'm looking at this issue only from the point of view of the definition of 'representative'. I reckon its risky, but usually beneficial, to take a 'left-field' approach to answering these essay questions. There is nothing more boring for a lecturer than to read the same crap in different words over and over again.

 

Give the lecturer something to think about and he'll reward you.

 

Monte.

[Live-Wire]

Reproduction from Epstein and Walker, pp.178 Table 3-5, with my further analysis below

 

Percentage of Voting-Age Population Registered to Vote

 

1960 1964 1970 1998

 

States Whites | Non-Whites Whites | Non-Whites Whites | Non-Whites Whites | Non-Whites

Alabama 63.6 13.7 70.7 23.0 85.0 66.0 74.1 74.3

Arkansas 60.9 38.0 71.7 54.4 74.1 82.3 65.9 51.8

Florida 69.3 39.4 84.0 54.4 65.5 55.3 61.1 50.4

Georgia 56.8 29.3 74.5 44.0 71.7 57.2 62.0 64.1

Louisiana 76.9 31.3 .4 32.0 77.0 57.4 75.2 69.5

Mississippi 63.9 5.2 70.7 6.7 82.1 71.0 75.2 71.3

North Carolina 92.1 39.1 92.5 46.8 68.1 51.3 65.6 57.4

South Carolina 57.1 13.7 78.5 38.8 62.3 56.1 67.9 68.0

Tennessee 73.0 59.1 72.9 69.4 78.5 71.6 63.9 64.8

Texas 42.5 35.5 53.2 57.7 62.0 72.6 59.7 62.1

Virginia 46.1 23.1 55.9 45.7 64.5 57.0 63.5 53.6

 

Averages 61.1 29.2 73.2 43.3 69.2 62.0 63.5 61.5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Additional analysis (by me)

 

Increases from 1964 -> 1970 of percentage of Non-White Registered Voters

 

Southern States Increases

Alabama + 43.0% <-

Arkansas + 27.9%

Florida + 0.9%

Georgia + 13.2%

Louisiana + 25.4%

Mississippi + 64.3% <-

North Carolina + 4.5%

South Carolina + 17.3%

Tennessee + 2.2%

Texas + 14.9%

Virginia + 11.3%

 

Average + 18.7%

[Live-Wire]

Here is the, terribly formatted, essay. I'm revising it for 30 minutes tommorow... but it'll remain largely the same.

 

Earl Warren’s Solutions to the Quandary of the United States as a Failed Republic

 

 

From the establishment of their cons!@#$%^&*ution, up until 1966, the United States dealt with the seemingly unsolvable quandary of their supposedly cons!@#$%^&*utional representative democracy instead being a government of partial and unequal representation, or even oligarchy. It was Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, who was the chief architect in orchestrating the move towards a real Republic in the U.S. His brilliance lay in his ability to skirt the authority of the Cons!@#$%^&*ution as a means to his ends, despite questions over the legality of his actions. With his rulings in key court cases, culminating with the upholding of the cons!@#$%^&*utionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in South Carolina v. Katzenback (1966), he overstepped boundaries on the Supreme Court because he knew drastic, and perhaps uncons!@#$%^&*utional, measures were required to solve the quandary. Previous attempts to rectify the issues of an un-republican government by Congress and previous Courts had been sound in theory, but failed in practice, until Chief Justice Warren and the other justices of the Warren Era made their first important decisions on the issue, in 1954, with Brown v. Board of Education and, in 1962, with Baker v. Carr.

The most important premise, and basic notion, of the Cons!@#$%^&*ution of the United States is that the government is ruled by the people. From the creation of that do-*BAD WORD*-ent, and for over 150 following years, the government of the United States did not represent the people – it represented an elite class, originally of aristocratic landowning white males, who comprised of an unbelievably small percentage of the population. The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments expressly made changes in the Cons!@#$%^&*ution to provide for equal voting rights to create a true Republic, yet even in 1960 the percentage of voting-age whites in Mississippi was 63.9%, while the percentage of voting-age blacks was 5.2%. In Alabama, 63.6% compared to 13.7%. In South Carolina, 57.1% compared to 13.7%. Indeed, the average percentages of all the Southern states showed a difference of 61.1% to 29.2%. The 13th amendment outlawed slavery, the 14th established “equal protection of the laws” and intended to create fair apportionment, and the 15th amendment indicated that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude.” Why then, despite these amendments to the foundation of the U.S. government, were they largely ineffectual? The quandary was mind-numbing to politicians in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The South created what are called, in popular terms, the Jim Crow laws, which completely worked around these three cons!@#$%^&*utional amendments, using the shield of Section 4, Article 3 of the cons!@#$%^&*ution, which guaranteed the States a republican form of government (Guarantee Clause) and the 10th amendment, which reserved the powers not given to the federal government, to the states. Grandfather clauses , literacy tests , poll taxes , white primaries , and even outright physical prevention of blacks from voting, were policies and laws used by the South to avoid following the cons!@#$%^&*utional representative democracy of the U.S. Later, movement in population upset the balance of representation in many States: In Tennessee in 1901, 43,000 voters lived in the urban district that included Memphis, which received 7.5 representatives. 11 representatives belonged to every other district combined, who combined to have the same population. In 1950, 312,000 voters lived in the district that included urban Memphis, which still received 7.5 representatives, since they had not reapportioned. The other districts combined to the same population, yet received 26 representatives, because more districts had been added. If you lived in rural Tennessee in 1950, your vote counted nearly 4 times as much as if you lived in urban Memphis. States defended their right to keep apportionment because the Cons!@#$%^&*ution reserved them that right under the 10th amendment, and they were right, as pre-Warren Supreme Court rulings grudgingly admitted.

Congress and the Executive made attempts to fix the quandary of unequal representation, but they were largely unsuccessful. The Freedmen’s Bureau was set up in 1865 by executive order, and Reconstruction imposed military power over the southern states, but the extreme leniency of Reconstructionist policies from President Johnson following Lincoln largely undermined any ability to make Reconstruction work. Violence against blacks was rampant in the South during this time. In 1937-1938, Congress passed anti-lynching and poll tax bills, but the effects did little to increase black participation in voting due to the simple threat of violence for defying local white authorities, who literally blocked the entrance to voting booths from blacks. Education is one of the highest correlations to desire-to-vote among voting-age citizens, but segregation in education lead to worse education for blacks. During WWII, Mississippi blacks comprise 57% of the school-age population, but received only 13% of the education budget. New Deal plans attempted to bring aid to the poor south (largely black), but simply opened the South to the harsh reality of industrial capitalism; there are winners, and there are losers (and in this case, the South was losing). In 1957, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, prohibiting attempts to intimidate or prevent people from voting. Yet, as demonstrated in earlier data, the South’s black registration was absurdly low in comparison to the white registration, and not for a lack of interest. “There was … no such thing as an entirely healthy, homogeneous and united black community anywhere in the United States during the early twentieth century.” This lack of cohesion in a political system largely driven by the power of collective action and money of interest groups held Black-Americans from breaking out of the history of undemocratic America, preventing the true Republic that the United States claimed to have. That is, until Earl Warren began to solve the unsolvable quandary. The Warren Court made three key decisions, one each on the issues of segregation, apportionment, and voting rights.

In Brown v. Board of Education, Chief Justice Warren delivered the opinion of the court, in which he comes to a groundbreaking announcement, “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race … deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does.” This ruling officially ended the segregation of the school system. The effects of this ruling were unfelt in the short run, because education does not take an instantaneous effect, but as demonstrated by the debate over affirmative action at the turn of the 21st century, it opened floodgates for further advancement. Despite the significance of this case, and its brilliant disregard for public opinion and the dangers of implementation that politicians in Congress and the Presidency largely suc-*BAD WORD*-bed to, it is the least significant of Warren’s three achievements in solving the quandary of the United States as a failed republic.

In Baker v. Carr (1962), the Warren Court addressed the issue of reapportionment, which years earlier the Supreme Court had been unable to tackle. In Colegrove v. Green (1946), the court had held that apportionment was left open by the Cons!@#$%^&*ution and therefore the federal government could not force reapportionment. As a result, there was a growing disparity between the voting power of urban and rural citizens. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, urban voters were largely poor and black, while the rural vote representing wealthier white interests. The rural vote began to count more than the urban vote, which created a cycle of rural-elected white politicians maintaining the unequal apportionment. In Baker v. Carr, the Warren Court handily takes care of the Tennessee apportionment situation. Despite the states-rights argument that the Guarantee Clause prevents federal intervention in apportionment, the Warren Court stepped completely around the argument by indicating that citizens are also guaranteed equal representation in a republican government. The court nearly went so far as to say the States were not republican governments. Previous courts had avoided questions of such a “political nature” to avoid stepping on the toes of other parts of the government, but the Warren Court had no such reservations. As a result of the Warren Court’s decision, Tennessee reapportioned, and many states have since, some specifically engineering their new districts to empower minorities by creating geographically-strange districts to make the State’s minority the district’s majority, essentially granting them a minority congressional representative. As in Brown v. Board of Education, Baker v. Carr was a triumphant challenge to the failed republic, but the last of Warren’s great achievements was the greatest.

In South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966), Chief Justice Earl Warren again delivers the opinion of the court, upholding the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as cons!@#$%^&*utional, despite the blatant reality that it was not. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 created a “triggering mechanism” that was triggered by either the passage of any voting restrictions prior to 1964, or if less than 50% of the voting-age population was registered to vote. The act was immediately triggered by nearly every Southern State. When the Act was triggered, the federal government sent federal examiners to register people to vote, but more importantly, triggered “preclearance” which required the attorney general (in the federal Justice Department) or a district court (a federal court) to approve any passage of laws. In other words, the Federal Government had the veto ability to stop South Carolina doing something as simple as raising their state taxes or amending their state cons!@#$%^&*ution. Needless to say, South Carolina immediately filed suite and brought it to the Supreme Court, with supporting amicus curiae briefs from five other states which had triggered the VRA. The states argued that it infringed on State’s rights and treated them in an unequal manner, an infringement on the basic rights granted by the reservation of powers in the Cons!@#$%^&*ution, a direct violation of the clear command that “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government” (Guarantee Clause). Warren rules to give the authority to congress to enact whatever legislation they deem necessary to uphold amendments despite other cons!@#$%^&*utional questions, and rejected the State’s complaints, among other reasons, because “After enduring nearly a century of widespread resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment, Congress has marshaled an array of potent weapons against the evil, with authority in the Attorney General to employ them effectively.” This is hardly an argument based on The Cons!@#$%^&*ution.

The effects of the upholding of the VRA of 1965 were immediately and dramatically felt. In Mississippi in 1964, 70.7% of voting-age whites were registered and only 6.7% of non-white. By 1970, six years later, 71% of voting-age non-whites in Mississippi were registered to vote. In Arkansas in 1970, 74.1% of voting-age whites were registered compared to the 82.3% of non-whites (in 1960, those numbers were 60.9% and 38.0% respectively). On average, in the ten year period from 1960-1970, voting-age non-white (minority) registration in Southern states increased from 29.2% to 62.0%. As 53% of blacks in the country lived in the South, this was the first time the United States truly had voters who represented the population of the country. Despite countless acts of Congress, Supreme Court rulings, social leaders, and the general population, no single act may have had so large an influence.

Whether or not the United States has perfected the goal of truly becoming a republic is obviously questionable. However, Chief Justice Earl Warren of the United States Supreme Court’s rulings finally shattering the gl!@#$%^&* ceiling above under-represented voters. The near-immediate correction of representation in the South in the middle of the Warren Court Era is evidence of his success. In Federalist Number 10, James Madison worried over the tyranny of the majority, a majority which largely controlled politics in the United States until the 1970s. Warren’s disregard for precedent or political pressures he deemed counterproductive to the U.S. as a republic were part of his genius. He often did not worry about what the Cons!@#$%^&*ution meant, but rather about what it should mean, pushing the Supreme Court power to interpret the law, as a tool to accomplish his own purpose of civil and equal voting rights. It was Chief Justice Warren who ushered in the new precedents to destroy this political monopoly by the majority, and perhaps solve, or at least advance the solution of, a quandary the great thinkers of more than the past 150 years had been unable to overcome.

[Live-Wire]

unfortunately, you can't read any of my footnotes... which are probably an additional page by themselves lol.

[MonteZuma]

To get something meaningful from those stats you need to compare with unaffected northern states.

 

Does everyone who is registered to vote actually vote? Very important point.

 

Why do they continue to record the colour of voters and how do they do this? Other demographical issues need to be considered too.

 

Interesting though. Thanks.

 

Btw. The gl!@#$%^&* ceiling analogy is a good one.

[madhaha]

The gl!@#$%^&* ceiling analogy is verging on cliche. I'm surprised you hadn't encountered it before.

 

LW: You might want to look at the vote fixing in the most recent elections. Truly representational voting (where EVERYONE votes) has never been done on the national scale and what voting that does occur is fixed/constrained. Whether representational government would work or not depends completely on how its implemented and sadly as you have noted, the only way it could ever happen is if someone from up high decides to break from the established rules and take a risk.

[MonteZuma]

The gl!@#$%^&* ceiling analogy is verging on cliche. I'm surprised you hadn't encountered it before.

Race isn't a big deal in this country any more. I've only heard the analogy used in relation to women's issues.

[Guest poop juice]

The gl!@#$%^&* ceiling analogy is verging on cliche. I'm surprised you hadn't encountered it before.

Race isn't a big deal in this country any more. I've only heard the analogy used in relation to women's issues.

 

The Truth behind the Pay Gap Numbers:

The commonly held wisdom is that, in spite of the advantages of the past decade, women still earn less than men. Even though that is what the headlines of various articles say, the content of those very same articles can often paint a very different picture.

 

Some of these articles provide textbook examples of how to manipulate otherwise legitimate research in order to mislead readers. For example, the AFL-CIO and the Ins!@#$%^&*ute for Women's Policy Research released a study in early March, 1999 called "Equal Pay for Working Families". The headline said that women earn about 74 cents for every dollar earned by men doing the same work. But the study defined "same work" simply as either "part time" or "full time," so that the jobs being compared were not as comparable as the study implied.

 

Let's use some common sense to see what the study really said. It is well-known that women, especially older women over 50, are far less likely to have graduated from college than men of the same age. The salaries that men and women earn probably reflect that difference, so we are left with the fact that a group of people [men] with a higher-than-average chance of having a college degree earns more than a group [women] with a lower-than-average chance of having a college degree. What is being reported is clearly a difference based on education, not on gender ... although the headline gives a totally different spin to the results.

 

Credible research on this issue takes pain to account for differences in age, education, occupation, and experience. Legitimate studies that do that routinely find that there is no disparity between genders as far as earnings are concerned.

 

A 1996 monograph by Korn/Ferry International en!@#$%^&*led "Decade of the Executive Woman" provides good insight into exactly this situation. The study compared a survey of 439 women executives in 1992 drawn from the Fortune 1000 industrial corporations and the Fortune 500 service companies with a 1989 study of 698 male executives at Fortune 500 industrial and Fortune 500 service companies. The findings regarding income for the 439 women were summarized in the following paragraph:

 

The women report working just as long as their male counterparts -- 56 hours a week -- but take home only two-thirds of the men's income, as shown in the 1989 study. The salary differential may be explained somewhat by the women's younger age (44 years, compared to 52 for the men in 1989) and by the fact that more are at the Vice President level, but unequal pay is still a fact.

 

Let's go behind the numbers to see if the conclusion in italics is warranted.

 

The numbers revealed that the women executives surveyed in 1992 were significantly younger than the men surveyed in 1989. The average age for women was 44, but men averaged 52. Furthermore, they achieved the landmark plateau of $100,000 in base salary at startlingly different ages. Over half of the women achieved that level before age 40, but only 31 percent of men did. On the other end of the spectrum, 36 percent of men were over the age of 46 when they first cracked that barrier, but only 11 percent of the women had to wait that long. It seems that women executives are very well paid at a much earlier age than their male counterparts.

 

The average annual compensation for men and women is a bit more difficult to compare. At first glance, the average salaries seem equivalent. The women surveyed in 1992 earned $187,000 on average while men in 1989 earned $190,000. Since most people would prefer to be earning $187,000 at age 44 over earning $190,000 at age 52, this appears to be a slam dunk for women.

 

But wait. A footnote in small type indicated that the 1989 survey of men asked for "base salary" while the 1992 survey of women was for "salary plus bonus." The average total compensation for men was reported to be $289,000. This is the basis for the report's conclusion that women "take home only two-thirds of the men's income," because $187,000 is about two thirds of $289,000. Aha! Men are clear winners after all.

 

Not so fast. The question remains, would you rather have $187,000 as a woman at age 44 or the newly revised figure for men of $289,000 at age 52? To aid in your decision, you need to know that a woman age 44 would reach absolute pay parity at age 52 through a pay increase of only 5.6 percent per year. If you assume a pay increase of less than 5.6 percent for women during their most productive executive years, then men win. A greater average annual pay raise means that women are better off.

 

We are fortunate that the data in the same Korn/Ferry report provides insight into this very question. That same report contains a similar study of 300 women executives conducted in 1982 that revealed an average salary of $92,000. The gain from $92,000 in 1982 to $187,000 in 1992 represents an average annual increase of 7.5 percent. That same annual increase applied to our average 44-year-old executive woman earning $187,000 yields an annual salary of $333,510 at age 52. That is 15 percent more than the $289,000 a man earns at the same age. Women win big time.

 

Please note that we have taken the impact of inflation into account here. The numbers are what they are. It seems odd that the Korn/Ferry report would claim that "unequal pay is still a fact," when any motivated person with a $3 calculator and an hour to kill can use the data in the same report to prove otherwise.

 

The truth concerning the entire issue of a "gender pay gap" is that when apples are compared with apples ... (a) women executives earn at least as much as men of similar age and experience, ( women age 27 to 33 earn as much as men in similar life situations, and © any other so-called "gender" differences can probably be easily explained by different levels of education and experience. But you have to go beyond the misleading headlines into the actual reports to learn the truth.

 

haha eat that