Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. apparently isn't sure whether he's for "Equal Pay Day," a designation intended to encourage employers to pay females the same as their male counterparts.

Huntsman won't sign a proposed declaration provided by several women's organizations, including the Business and Professional Women of Utah, without seeing how his predecessors handled the issue.

But his staff has only one previous declaration for the day from 1998, according to the governor's spokeswoman, Tammy Kikuchi, even though the organizations backing the declaration said it was routinely signed in past administrations.

That's not enough, Kikuchi said, to make sure "the governor isn't signing something that could get him into trouble. . . . It's not a situation where he's not willing to sign it. He doesn't have enough information."

Kikuchi said the governor, who took office in January, has some 80 proposed declarations to consider. "The protocol with a new governor is we like to see what other governors have done."

Shauna Scott-Bellaccomo, a state employment counselor who contacted the governor's office on behalf of several women's organizations, said one example of a past declaration should be plenty.

"I just think he is a new governor and he is afraid to take a stand on the issue," Scott-Bellaccomo said. "I felt like if he can't read the (proposed declaration) and judge it on its own merits, he's not going to sign it."

Kikuchi said she didn't know what the governor's stand on equal pay for equal work is. "I don't know. I haven't asked him," she said. Huntsman was in New York City on Wednesday.

The proposed declaration Huntsman was asked to sign cites statistics released in 2004 by the U.S. Census Bureau showing full-time working women in 2003 earned only 76 percent of what working men were paid, "indicating little change or progress in pay equity. . . . "

It goes on to cite other statistics, such as that the wage disparity costs the average American woman and her family an estimated $523,000 in lost wages. "Fair pay strengthens the security of families," the proposed declaration states, and enhances the nation's economy.

April 19th was chosen as "Equal Pay Day" because it "symbolizes the time in the new year in which the wages paid to American women catch up to the wages paid to men from the previous year," according to the proposed declaration, which is just over one page long.

Although "Equal Pay Day," which is observed nationally, has been marked in the past in Utah with academic forums and other events, Scott-Bellaccomo said that would not be the case this year.

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