Betsy Hart: Finding the truth about women's pay

That's what I thought as I read Lisa Belkin's cover story in this week's New York Times Magazine titled, "Q: Why Don't More Women Get to the Top? A: They Choose Not To."

Belkin reports in a sort of "wow, have I ever figured out something here" fashion on educated, accomplished, ambitious women who have left or limited high-powered careers to raise young children, and who are happy with that choice.

Belkin admits that these days if the "glass ceiling" isn't being broken, it's because women are choosing not to crack it.

"Wander into any Starbucks .... . after the commuters are gone," Belkin writes. "See all those mothers drinking coffee and watching over toddlers at play? If you look past the Lycra gym clothes and the Internet-access cell phones, the scene could be the '50s, but for the fact that the coffee is more expensive and the mothers have MBA's.

"We've gotten so used to the sight that we've lost track of the fact that this was not the way it was supposed to be. Women -- specifically, educated professional women -- were supposed to achieve like men. ..."

Belkin, who writes a regular column for the Times about "the intersection of work and life," doesn't bemoan the truth she's discovered. Apparently, she came to her insight through her many readers who wrote to her of their experiences leaving high-powered jobs for kids. She says "anecdotal experience counts when it becomes cumulative. I could never have written this without having done the column. I couldn't see the trend until I looked back at what I had been learning."

Q : Where Has Belkin Been? A: Holed Up in the Ivory Tower of the New York Times.

Memo to Belkin: I could name a dozen women writers, policy makers, economists and analysts who have recognized and extensively chronicled this trend for 10 years or more. As early as 1994, economist June O'Neill showed in the Wall Street Journal that data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth revealed that "among people ages 27 to 33 who have never had a child, women's earnings are close to 98 percent of men's." Even then it was clear, said O'Neill, that it was the introduction of children into a woman's life and her choices about leaving or limiting her work life to care for them that, when taken in the aggregate, was responsible for the continuing women's "pay gap" so often reported in the news.

Back in 1999, scholars Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Christine Stolba of the Independent Women's Forum, co-authored a book, "Women's Figures," about women's tremendous economic progress, including the fact that generalized "pay gaps" between men and women are now almost exclusively caused by the choices large percentages of high-achieving women make to limit their work lives for their children.

Writers Kate O'Beirne, Mona Charen, Danielle Crittenden, Meghan Cox Gurdon, Linda Chavez and so many others (including yours truly) have talked and written for a decade or more about this trend and its implications for everything from human nature to public policy.

All of these writers consider it a positive thing that women have the choice to work. Yet they also consider it a positive thing, as do, apparently, the moms at issue here, that so many of these high-powered women have chosen to stay home with their young kids. But none of these writers were referenced in the Belkin piece. (Though Belkin did refer to the work of several women who've written of how "the workplace has failed women.")

I'm not really picking on Belkin. She's a good writer, and I find her column interesting and thoughtful. As a writer myself, I know it's often the case that one hopes (though often vainly) to shed new light on an old subject.

I just find it instructive to ask why Belkin, the "Life's Work" columnist for the "newspaper of record," couldn't see until now what so many others have been chronicling for at least a decade.

Answer: While I don't know Belkin's politics, I do know she is steeped in the culture of the New York Times, which like so many organizations in the "upper strata" of our culture is daily marinated in feminist, elitist thought. That, in turn, doesn't allow for much clear thinking when the answers are politically incorrect ones.

The fact that Belkin's arrival at an obvious truth was so belated is really a symptom of a larger problem in the kind of world she inhabits. But then again give credit where credit is due: Belkin did, finally, get to the right place.

Lisa, you've come a long way, baby.

Betsy Hart, a frequent commentator on CNN and the Fox News Channel, can be reached by e-mail at: mailtohart@aol.com.