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“With women, as with racial and ethnic minorities, the effects of policies must be carefully separated from the intentions of those policies. The crucial question is not the desirability of the professed goal but the incentives and constraints created and what they are most likely to lead to. The imposition of monthly equality in pensions, rather than lifetime equality, has the net effect of making pension plans more expensive, the more female employees there are [because women live longer than men]. Viewed as prospective behavioral incentives, rather than as a retrospective status pronouncement, this means that employers will find it more costly to hire female work- ers with a given pension plan and more costly to institute a given pension plan when there are more female workers. Reducing the demand for female workers or reducing the likelihood of creating a pension plan is hardly the intention of the courts, but it can easily be the result. It is not clear that anyone is economically better off after such a symbolic ruling.” — Thomas Sowell