Disturbing

I found this quote disturbing. It was in a Reason article on Carly Fiorina.

"She [Fiorina] has no use for laws mandating "equal pay" or paid maternity leave or contraceptive coverage that movement feminists espouse and Clinton laps up—for the obvious reason that they'll backfire by making women more expensive and hence less employable. "

While I do agree that there are some issues with feminism, how is advocating for equal pay amongst workers doing equal work making "women more expensive"? Are they cheap labor now because we can underpay them and that's just dandy?

I don't know if Fiorina is a good candidate or not. Certainly she's not a professional politician, which is attractive to me. However, the author of the piece, in trying for a libertarian/freedom based approach seems to dismiss the idea that discrimination or blatant abuse of power to pay one group less is a good thing, disturbs me. While people should be free to negotiate, rarely is there an equal set of power, and plenty of companies and people take advantage of situations to pay less.

At the same time, I do think that some people are willing to work for less or work harder, and we can't discourage that. I guess I'm really not sure what I think is a solution, but that quote really disturbs me.