During this week’s Democratic primary debates, moderators asked several of the candidates what they would do to “close the gender pay gap.” Of course, this question completely ignores the fact that Congress has already passed the Equal Pay Act of 1963 which explicitly prohibits gender-based discrimination in wages.
Nonetheless, the candidates offered interesting answers.
Julián Castro said that he would pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard pivoted to how she would stop foreign wars and reinvest that money into America. Businessman Andrew Yang discussed further his $1,000 “Freedom Dividend” plan for universal basic income, arguing it could close this gap.
Meanwhile, Sen. Kamala Harris had the most robust explanation:
Castro’s answer would do nothing — there’s already federal law on the books guaranteeing “equal pay for equal work.” Gabbard basically avoided the question. Meanwhile, Yang’s plan will never become reality.
Harris’ answer, however, relies on the same old, misleading statistics and talking points.
Her campaign plan is to expand federal bureaucracy by making companies get an “Equal Pay Certification” from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by demonstrating that after “accounting for differences in job titles, experience, and performance” there is no wage discrepancy among “work of equal value.”
This is a vague standard. Two crucial aspects are missing: hours worked and individual choices.
Women are paid 80 cents on the dollar compared to men only if you compare the aggregate amount that full-time working women and full-time working men are paid and compare the figures to each other absent all context. This statistic does not take into account differences in professional occupation, educational levels, experience, job conditions, risk, or hours worked.
The same holds true for all other numbers that Harris cited. When these relevant factors are accounted for, the narrative of the “gender wage gap” falls apart.
For instance, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the difference in hours worked accounted for half of the wage gap. In 2017, twice as many men worked more than 41 hours and 60 hours a week than women. Women were also 2.5 times more likely to work less than 40 hours a week.
According to a Georgetown University survey, more men work in the most lucrative fields and more women in the least lucrative fields. As such, comparing average earnings and whining about “equal pay for equal work” just doesn’t make sense. And while some of this imbalance in high paying professions might be due to structural imbalances, you still have to blame a fair bit of it on individual choices. Undercutting the Democrat’s narrative even more, female CEOs out-earned their male counterparts by an average of $7 million.
Furthermore, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average man worked 85 hours more than the average woman did in 2017. Naturally, the gender that works more hours, when their incomes are aggregated, would earn more in total. Controlling for hours worked, women make 88.2% of the median income of males.
This is just one contributing factor.
A PayScale study concluded that women made 98% of what men made when accounting for experience, industry, and job level. Even a recent Harvard University study found an 11-cent pay gap between men and women in a union environment that had strict pay scales because women chose to work fewer overtime hours and take more unpaid vacation. For Democrats to push the misleading narrative that there’s a massive pay gap due to sexism only needlessly polarizes the electorate and completely ignores reality.
Mackenzie Bettle is a J.D. candidate at Seton Hall Law School. You can find him on Twitter @MackenzieBettle.
