California’s Gavin Newson recently signed a law requiring companies to make average salaries for each gender public, portrayed as championing equality in the workplace. By all means, bring it on. Americans deserve to know that they are being paid as well as their coworkers, but don’t try to claim that the United States has a gender wage gap.
We’ve all heard the line: “Women earn 77 cents for every dollar men make.” Feminist leaders such as Senator Elizabeth Warren and primetime host Rachel Maddow proudly parrot it day in and day out. Large protests trumpet the claim while demanding equal pay for women. There’s just one glaring problem: that statement is nonsense.
Let’s start with how the infamous “77 cents” was derived. Researchers compared the median wages for full-time working men and women in the United States regardless of occupation. This means, hypothetically, if all women worked as janitors making $10,000 per year and all men worked as doctors making $100,000 per year, the supposed “wage gap” would be 90%. Clearly, this methodology is flawed and useful only for shock value. There is more to wages than gender.
For example, like it or not, women simply choose lower paying career paths. Even though women make up 55% of trade school students, they simply refuse to follow the money, making up a whopping 83% of the lower-income trades. And no, women aren’t being steered into these fields. Title IX made that a federal crime half a century ago, and, unfortunately, nothing’s really changed in women’s preferences.
The most embarrassing statistics for the wage gap argument are the ones that flip the script. Unmarried, childless women aged 40-64 actually earn 17.5% more than their male counterparts: $47,000 compared to men’s $40,000. Women in this category have actually earned more than men reaching back to 1971, before Title IX existed. And, gosh, one would think that the “77 cents” statistic would at least hold meaningful value for the poorest Americans, but, again, women are actually better off than men, earning 34% more than them at part-time jobs. All of this begs the question, are we even trying to tip the scales the right way?
Some studies, when accounting for occupations, still find a single digit gap between men and women. This can easily be accounted for by (surprise, again) men working 44 hours a week to women’s 42, a gap that matches perfectly to the disparity. Additionally, women bear children, and, for the foreseeable future, they will continue to be the only gender capable of this feat. This means less experience in the workplace which simply equates to less pay. As the somewhat gruesome cherry on top, men account for 92% of workplace deaths because they overwhelmingly dominate fields with hazardous conditions, conditions which pay a considerable premium.
If women were truly paid less than men in a capitalistic society, wouldn’t companies just hire more women? Instead, once again, the opposite is true. Men are roughly 20% more likely to hold a job than women. A simple analysis of the cold hard facts overwhelmingly disproves a gender wage gap.
Women entering the workfield shouldn’t be intimidated by a lie. Lower salary expectations, unlike the wage gap myth, may actually cause women to be at a disadvantage in the workplace. Americans, especially young Americans, should know their worth and fight wholeheartedly against these bizarre campaigns. I’ll leave you with this. Hillary Clinton, a champion of fighting for so-called “wage equality,” had a wage gap on her Senate staff of 72 cents to the dollar. If wage gap activists are attempting to assert that the queen of the movement herself, a woman, is discriminating against her own gender, I have nothing else to say.
Judy. “What’s behind the Gender Wage Gap: Andrew Syrios.” Mises Institute, 20 Mar. 2015, mises.org/library/whats-behind-gender-wage-gap.
Field, Kelly. “Why Are Women Still Choosing the Lowest-Paying Jobs?” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 25 Jan. 2018, www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/why-are-women-still-choosing-the-lowest-paying-jobs/551414/.
Field, Kelly. “Why Are Women Still Choosing the Lowest-Paying Jobs?” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 25 Jan. 2018, www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/why-are-women-still-choosing-the-lowest-paying-jobs/551414/.
Field, Kelly. “Why Are Women Still Choosing the Lowest-Paying Jobs?” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 25 Jan. 2018, www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/why-are-women-still-choosing-the-lowest-paying-jobs/551414/.
Field, Kelly. “Why Are Women Still Choosing the Lowest-Paying Jobs?” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 25 Jan. 2018, www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/why-are-women-still-choosing-the-lowest-paying-jobs/551414/.
