Wow, this is rich. Texas' Rethuglican Party Chair Beth Cubriel thinks that the key to closing the gender pay gap is that women should learn to be "better negotiators." After opposing the equal-pay-for-equal-work landmark Lilly Ledbetter Act, Rethuglicans are hard pressed to come up with answers to the pay gap that working women are all too familiar with. For political optics, they've given up on the "women should be at home, not at work competing with men" idiocy, so they're reaching for "negotiating" skills as a remedy, as if that helps mitigate the general problem. Maybe "negotiations" have worked in Ms. Cubriel's career (and we won't go there), but it's not an answer.
UPDATE: Also, some Republican women think women are "too busy" to be concerned with equal pay issues.
UPDATE II: And others think all that equality talk makes them look like "whiners."
