Chamber of Commerce Senior Communications Director Brad Peck decided to commemorate the 90th anniversary of suffrage, the recognition of women’s right to vote, by suggesting last week that women who want equal pay have a “fetish for money,” and recommending that women focus our energies on “choosing the right partner at home.”
His post was titled “Equality, Suffrage and a Fetish for Money.” Instead of quoting at length, I’ll let Peck’s own comments on Twitter, in response to SEIU’s Kate Thomas, give you the shorter version in his words:
No. Point was pay is just one thing of value. To achieve your values need to pick the right job/right partner. (1/2)
Fixating on pay as the only thing of value shows a fetish for money. (2/2)
In the post itself, he approvingly quoted another writer who compared women’s interest in equal pay to the famously greedy, stingy Disney character, Scrooge McDuck.
Peck went on to say that “individual choices” about how much time women take out of paid work are responsible for most of the pay gap. The mysterious reason for all this extra time off that women end up taking? Peck doesn’t say explicitly in his own words, but he’s clearly referring to family responsibilities, as spelled out in the section of the New York Times article that he quotes at length in the body of his post.
The message seemed clear enough: if women chose not to have children, they didn’t have much to worry about. Only someone with a “fetish for money” would be concerned about the rest of the pay gap.
After his post was roundly bashed on other blogs, Peck added a sort-of apology, and the next day David Chavern, the COO of the Chamber wrote a post walking Peck’s statements back. But this is cold comfort, because the Chamber has lobbied for years against legislative efforts to reduce gender disparities at work, particularly fighting hard against accommodations for pregnancy and motherhood.
The market has failed women, failed their families. What’s truly offensive is that neither Peck, nor Chavern, nor any of their colleagues will acknowledge it. Chavern pretends complete ignorance of the well-documented reasons why women do better in environments “they create for themselves.” Presumably, environments women create for themselves don’t regard their experience as parents as a trivial annoyance causing mental incapacity.
Thanks in part to the efforts of the Chamber of Commerce, laws against pay equity have been delayed and are still insufficient. Thanks in part to the efforts of the Chamber of Commerce, the US is alone in industrialized countries without paid leave for new mothers.
They can’t apologize sweetly enough to make these assaults on the financial security of America’s working families less damaging.
Photo courtesy, Julien Haler on Flickr, Creative Commons licensed, 2009.
Cross posted from SEIU Early Learning.