HEN GEORGE ORWELL commented that equality is a word which is ''often used in a consciously dishonest way,'' he could have been speaking of Al Gore's promise to women to fight for ''equal pay for an equal day's work.''
Gore's pledge to reduce the so-called wage gap is the centerpiece of his strategy to win the women's vote. Not surprisingly, Gore has chosen to focus on ''equal pay'' because, unlike other traditional women's issues such as abortion and affirmative action (on which women disagree), equal pay is seemingly uncontroversial. After all, who could possibly be against equality? Of course, expressing support for equal pay is a little like coming out in favor of reducing violent crime.
Everyone agrees with the idea in principle, but the devil is often in the details.
In this case, federal law already prohibits employers from paying different wages to equally qualified men and women who perform the same job. And similarly situated men and women already earn virtually identical wages. So, why the call to arms?
On his Web site, Gore cites the the frequently misused statistic that, on average, women earn about 75 cents to a man's dollar.
But bare averages fail to tell the whole story - and the whole story is more complex than Gore would have women believe.
What Gore intentionally leaves out is the fact that many women with children choose to take time out of the labor market while their kids are young. Others opt for jobs with better benefits and greater flexibility over jobs with higher salaries. And even women without children sometimes select occupations that pay less than other jobs because of quality of life issues.
According to a study by the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, women age 27 to 33 who have never had a child earn approximately 98 cents to a man's dollar. This statistic is terrific news indeed and is testament to the success of current antidiscrimination statutes such as the Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which have guaranteed equal opportunity for working women for decades.
But, make no mistake about it, the Democrats do not believe that it is enough for men and women to achieve equal opportunity in the workplace.
In Al Gore's America, the government must legislate equal results. Thus, Gore has expressed support for legislation introduced in Congress last year which reduces an employer's ability to rely on prevailing market rates in setting salaries. The legislation would authorize the secretary of labor to establish ''guidelines'' for evaluating whether wages for jobs dominated by women and jobs dominated by men are ''discriminatory.''
In other words, the legislation promotes equalizing wages for different occupations. This is not, as Gore says, ''equal pay for equal work'' - it is equal pay for unequal work. Feminists call this ''comparable worth.'' Others might call it socialism.
Gore's plan will hurt the women of America. According to Public Agenda Online, 59 percent of Americans support allowing parents more flexible work schedules; 91 percent of mothers say that job flexibility is important to them. But Gore's scheme to centralize wages will certainly constrain employers' ability to offer such benefits.
And what about women who work raising their children? Gore's proposal will harm many of these women by depressing their husbands' wages. Although current law forbids employers to remedy pay disparities by lowering the salary of higher paid employees, rest assured that employers who are forced to increase the wages of their secretaries in order to bring them into line with those of their construction workers will hesitate to raise salaries of construction workers in the future.
Moreover, artificially inflating the wages of whole categories of employees will result in fewer jobs for all Americans. Says Christine Stolba, director of Economic Projects for the Independent Women's Forum (an organization on whose national advisory board I sit), ''the only people who benefit from a wage-setting regime such as the one supported by Gore are government bureaucrats, trial lawyers, and feminist special interest groups who think they know better than the free market.''
As Orwell warned, terms such as equality can be manipulated to serve any purpose. In an age when women are having a hard enough time convincing employers to adopt family friendly flex-time arrangements, women should beware of proposals that will afford them less freedom of choice.
Jennifer C. Braceras is an attorney and research fellow at Harvard Law School. Her column appears regularly in the Globe.
