Fox News host Martha MacCallum on Wednesday argued that women don’t need Congress to address inequality in the workplace.
“Many women make exactly what they’re worth,” she said on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.” “And they don’t want to be treated like some group of people who have to be, you know, given a little special handout just to make sure that they’re okay.”
MacCallum, Daily Caller editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson and liberal radio host Alan Colmes discussed President Obama’s call for pay equality for women in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. Obama called the pay gap an “embarrassment.”
When Colmes asked MacCallum whether women are worth the same amount as men, MacCallum said that “they’re worth a heck of a lot.”
MacCallum said she doesn’t see gender inequality in the workplace.
“The numbers, when you look at them, do not bear out that there is a war on women in the workplace,” she said, as quoted by Raw Story. “And I think it’s a question of how liberals and conservative view what needs to be done for women.”
Carlson agreed that there is no pay gap — if you factor in maternity leave.
“Women make more than men if you adjust for the time they take off for child-bearing,” he said. “That’s a fact.”
MacCallum jumped in to say that women shouldn’t be treated differently than men in any way.
“I think most women do not want to be treated as sort of a special class of citizens,” she said. “They want to go to work every day, they want to get paid for being a professional, for doing their job really well.”
Carlson implied that women take maternity leave “voluntarily.” And when Colmes argued that women did not volunteer to be able to carry a child, Carson said he was “mad at biological reality.”
Watch a clip of the exchange via Media Matters:
