Nothing has worked to close the gender wage gap — not the 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, not Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, not the 1991 amendments to Title VII, not affirmative action, not diversity... Nor will the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act work. The wage gap will stubbornly persist because pay-equity advocates continue to ignore this:

Despite the 40-year-old demand for women's equal pay, millions of wives still choose to have no pay at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of "The Secrets of Happily Married Women," stay-at-home wives, including the childless, constitute a growing niche. "In the past few years,” he says in a CNN August 2008 report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.” (“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier....” at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka. Perhaps more women are staying at home because feminists and the media have told them relentlessly for years that women are paid less than men in the same jobs, and so why bother working if they're going to be penalized and humiliated for being a woman.)

As full-time mothers or homemakers, stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living in luxury? Because they're supported by their husband.

If millions of wives can accept no wages and live as well as their husbands, millions of other wives can accept low wages, refuse to work overtime, refuse promotions, take more unpaid days off, avoid uncomfortable wage-bargaining (http://preview.tinyurl.com/23qycq)— all of which lowers women's average pay. They can do this because they are supported by husbands who must earn more than if they'd remained single — which is how MEN help create the wage gap. (If the roles were reversed so that men raised the children and women raised the income, men would average lower pay than women.)

What about single women who hope to marry? Most are keenly aware of men's extant general willingness to sooner or later economically support the woman they marry. Thus countless numbers of these women configure their jobs, careers, and aspirations accordingly. Many hope to marry — and actively look for — a man who earns enough to offer them the three options cited by Warren Farrell in his book "Why Men Earn More": work full-time, work part-time, or work full-time as a housewife. These women often regard a husband as their primary employer. In return for their husband's media-unappreciated generosity, these women plan to offer him three slightly different options: work full-time, work full-time, work full-time with overtime when the wife leaves the workforce, nearly always at a time of her choosing.

Men's willingness to support their wives is the underlying real reason for the sexes' infamous (to ideological feminists and the mainstream media) wage gap, women's 78 cents to men's dollar.

To many, the current legislation aimed at closing the gender wage gap soon begins to look absurd. But if women's pay-equity advocates want to pass absurd legislation that would really work, would indeed close the gender wage gap — almost overnight — they should urge a law that prohibits men from supporting women.

Think about it. If men were prohibited from supporting women, every unemployed wife in the country would be forced to get a job. And millions of employed women would be forced to obtain a better one, raising women's average pay immediately and dramatically. “Without husbands," says Farrell, "women have to focus on earning more. They work longer hours, they're willing to relocate and they're more likely to choose higher-paying fields like technology. Women who have never been married and are childless earn 117 percent of their childless male counterparts." (See http://tinyurl.com/nm6t6s.)

And how would this prohibition affect men? Millions would no longer feel the need for a high-paying job to attract women and gain and hold a woman's love. A good number of the men already holding a high-paying and likely stressful job would gleefully walk away, sending employers into a recruiting frenzy, perhaps to recruit mostly women.

Men wouldn't have to earn as much, and women would have to earn more. Presto — the sexes' wage gap would snap shut with a thunderous clap. An ideological feminist fantasy come true!

By the way, the next Equal Occupational Fatality Day is in 2020. The year 2020 is how far into the future women will have to work to experience the same number of work-related deaths that men experienced in 2009 alone. See http://tinyurl.com/yab2blv

(See “A Male Matters Response to the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act” at http://tinyurl.com/pvbrcu)