During Tuesday night’s debate, Democrats mentioned only twice the disparity between men and women’s earnings and avoided the tired old claim that women are paid just 78 cents to the dollar that men are paid. The implication of that statistic, of course, is that discrimination is at play.
Despite the party consistently parroting that line, the statistic is highly misleading. The 78-cents figure comes from comparing the median earnings of all women to the median earnings of all men. While gender gap warriors like to imply that discrimination is the factor, the comparison is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison of men and women working side-by-side at the exact same job with the exact same experience, education and hours.
In her opening statement last night, frontrunner Hillary Clinton mentioned that she believes in “equal pay for equal work for women,” and that was the closest anyone came to suggesting discrimination. Again, the wage gap isn’t the result of unequal pay for equal work. It is the result of unequal pay for unequal work, that is, men and women working different jobs with different levels of experience, education and hours worked.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was the only other candidate on the stage to even allude to the issue, including “pay equity for women workers” in a list of solutions to the broader issue of income inequality.
The wage gap is almost entirely due to the choices women make, about what jobs to take, what hours to work, how much time to take off, etc., and if there is any remaining pay gap, it can’t be conclusively linked to discrimination.
Chanting “equal pay for equal work” might make a good sound bite, but it is meaningless, as studies showing a pay gap don’t compare men and women working side by side at the same job. The statistics on the wage gap compare apples to oranges. For example, when comparing social science majors, male economists are compared to female sociologists. Even though they are both social science majors, clearly, one of those jobs pays more than the other.
When it comes to selecting high-paying jobs, women often don’t take the bait. Of the 10 most-lucrative college majors, women dominate men in just one: Pharmacy sciences / Administration. But of the 10 least-lucrative majors, women dominate men in nine of the 10.
The fact is that the pay gap is due to women’s choices, not discrimination. The White House knows this, despite continuously employing the line to score political points.
Even worse, the proposed “solutions” for the “problem” won’t do much, since those solutions don’t force women to make different choices. Worse still, the proposed solutions, like the one recently passed in California, might hurt women in the long run, as employers may avoid hiring new employees (including women) to avoid an increase in lawsuits over pay.
Whenever you hear Democrats claiming that they’ll close the gender wage gap, they’re lying about their ability to do so, because otherwise they are advocating for controlling women’s choices (and that’s absurd).
P.S.: Equal pay has been the law since 1963.
