It’s the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote! Time to celebrate! In 1971, Congresswoman Bella Abzug declared August 26 Women’s Equality Day. Again, time to celebrate!  Women rule their world, as I recapped after the 2010 BlogHer conference. Once more, time to celebrate!  Women have choice in their lives.

Don’t listen to all the doom and gloom and victimization talk on the “gender wage gap”!  This comes from people who want to keep women dependent on government. The Independent Women’s Forum, “all issues are women’s issues”, blew apart the myth of the gender wage gap in 2005:

The 76-cent statistic (now actually 80 cents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau) is misleading because it is a raw comparison of all working men and women. Thus a female receptionist working 40-hour weeks is tossed in with the male orthopedic surgeon putting in 70-hour weeks.

A study of the gender wage gap conducted by economist June O’ Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, found that women earn 98 percent of what men do when controlled for experience, education, and number of years on the job.

Warren Farrell, three-time board of directors member of the National Organization for Women New York City, exhaustively debunks the wage gap myth in his book “Why Men Earn More.” Farrell documents occupations requiring bachelor’s degrees in which women’s starting salaries actually exceed men’s. Female investment bankers and dietitians, for example, can expect to earn 116 percent to 130 percent of their male counterparts’ salaries.

As I stated in a post titled “Working for the man,” I choose to make less money because a flexible schedule that allows me to be available for my kids is more important than money. IWF confirmed that its “choice” not gender that dictates income.

The real reason than men tend to out-earn women is the choices they make. Men are far more likely to take unpleasant and dangerous jobs, what Farrell calls the “death and exposure professions.” For example, firefighting, truck driving, mining and logging — to name just a few high-risk jobs — are all more than 95 percent male. Conversely, low risk jobs like secretarial work and childcare are more than 95 percent female.

Think about it.  If hiring women only could reduce a business’s labor cost by 20 to 30 percent, wouldn’t it make good business sense to do so?

The real obstacle to women’s or anyone else’s achievement is government spending, which requires too much of our money — on average, 64 percent of working folks income must go to pay for government spending and regulations.

On Women’s Equality Day, I am grateful to all the women who came before me so that I can enjoy the choices I have today, but I am MAD that reckless, irresponsible government spending threatens those very choices that women before worked so hard to get. No wonder I am MAD.