A blind eye to gender bias

FIRST LADY Laura Bush yesterday praised Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers by saying: ''I know Harriet well. I know how accomplished she is. I know how many times she's broken the glass ceiling herself."

Bush made that comment in the context of being asked on NBC whether she detected sexism in the criticism of Miers's qualifications. ''That's possible. I think that's possible," Bush said. ''I think she is so accomplished. I think people are not looking at her accomplishments."

She is no doubt sincere in her singular defense of Miers. It also ironic that she invoked the glass ceiling while her husband's administration has quietly stopped collecting detailed information on women in the workforce.

In August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics discontinued its women worker employment series in the current employment statistics payroll survey. The women worker employment series ensured the most detailed monthly snapshots and long-term trends on the number of women workers in individual industries.

The bureau said it discontinued the series because it ''imposed a significant reporting burden" to ask 160,000 businesses representing about 400,000 individual worksites to note gender in their monthly reporting of employment, hours, and earnings of their workers. ''In an increasingly difficult data-collection environment," the bureau says on its website, ''survey response burden is a crucial factor in survey design."

The bureau also claimed the women workers series was ''little used." The agency said that ''extensive" data on women in the workplace will still be available in the Current Population Study, the monthly survey of 60,000 households.

Critics of the bureau's action say there is little comparison between a survey of 60,000 households and a survey of 400,000 worksites, especially since there is no other reliable information on hours and pay on a gender basis. Vicky Lovell, study director for the Institute for Women's Policy Research, a Washington think tank that focuses on the condition of women in the workplace, said: ''In the current employment environment, where there's a lot of change, with rapidly fading industries and rapidly emerging industries, we need to know where women or men are concentrated to know if we need to develop certain policies. We need to know if economic growth or decline is being shared. Are men and women gaining or losing jobs at the same rate? There is plenty of research to show that men and women are affected differently in downturns and expansions in the public and private sector."

Lovell attended a July meeting with the Bureau of Labor Statistics to argue for the continuation of the gender data collection. ''The BLS produced no analysis to us to prove that collecting gender information from actual workplaces was a burden. They offered no evidence."

The ending of the data collection comes from a Bush administration that has repeatedly deleted the hard truths from official documents -- from global warming to racial discrimination at the Justice Department to disparities in healthcare. Lovell herself did not ascribe any aggressive political agenda to the deletion of detailed women's employment statistics but said that the move displayed ''a lack of awareness that men and women don't work at the same jobs. I think that in the political arena generally, there's an unwillingness to consider women's issues in employment as being important and different from men. We don't have a lot of willingness among political leaders to address the barriers women face."

Lovell said that without a political willingness to address barriers and without the detailed information to help Americans know what barriers to address, the issue is bigger than that of promotion at the top.

''The data collection issue is more relevant to glass walls than glass ceilings," she said. ''This is the kind of data that can tell you whether women or men are being walled off from certain industries or walled into certain industries. There is still so much difference between the types of work of men and women and still so many barriers to horizontal mobility between industries. We still need to be asking, for instance, how it is in the 21st century that so many women are walled off into the service industry?"

Those are questions the Bush administration no longer wants the answers to. Laura Bush, sensing a disparity in the reception for Harriet Miers, said she knows how accomplished the Supreme Court nominee is. Her husband's administration is making sure that the disparities faced by everyday women become more invisible than ever.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.