Don’t believe the hype. The gender wage gap isn’t worse than you thought. It’s not 80 cents to the dollar, and despite economically illiterate media reporting, it’s certainly not 49 cents to the dollar.

If you read “data journalism” about a “gender wage gap,” it’s often a blunt comparison of the real median annual earnings of men and those of women both working full-time and year-round. In 2017, the Census Bureau found that the ratio was 0.805. The media dishonestly turns this ratio into a dollar value, declaring that women make 80 cents for every dollar a man makes. Or, according to a new study, that women “earn just 49 cents to the typical men’s dollar.”