Four major problems with Vox’s ‘wage gap’ explainer

But there are some big problems with this explanatory piece, which presents rather flimsy evidence for an assertion that has never stood up to much scrutiny.

1.) The description

Before you even click on the video, the YouTube description attempts to paint those who point out the wage gap isn’t due to discrimination as people who claim women choose lower pay. The description claims the wage gap exists “and it’s not because women ‘choose’ to be paid less.”

But no one is saying women choose to be paid less. Rather, men and women make different choices when they look for work based on personal preferences (such as career, flexibility and time off), and those choices lead to higher or lower pay.

2.) Using the women’s soccer team to prove the wage gap

It seems a bit strange to use international sports as the example when you’re trying to prove a point about office workers in America. But the anecdotal evidence of U.S. women’s team players being paid less than members of the men’s national team is the only evidence we get for roughly the first half of the video.

Male and female soccer players who play for USSF are paid under two completely different structures that reflect the maturity of their respective games. The women are actually employed by USSF and earn a base salary of $72,000, plus benefits like health insurance. The players on the men’s team, who have long mostly played in professional leagues full-time (some of them in Europe) are paid on a per-game basis with no benefits.

In 2015, the women’s soccer team brought in $26.8 million in revenue (Solo offers another figure that appears to be incorrect) and the men’s team brought in $21 million. Note, however, that this probably isn’t a solid comparison. The women’s team was in the World Cup finals that year, and got a $2 million bonus they brought in from FIFA by winning their tournament. (The year before, the U.S. men’s team had played their tournament and brought in a $9 million bonus from FIFA for making the round of 16, where they lost to Belgium.)

Five members of the women’s soccer team have sued USSF for wage discrimination. They argue that women earn $1,350 for winning a game, whereas men earn $5,000 for losing and up to $17,625 if they win against a high-ranked opponent. The video uses a graphic showing that if the women lose every game, they still earn $72,000 (plus benefits), but if men lose every game they earn $100,000.

But Politifact rated the claim that women’s soccer brought in so much more revenue while being paid so much less as “Mostly False,” for most of the reasons I’ve already stated. A U.S. Soccer spokesman noted, among other things, that women’s soccer is a comparatively young sport with only seven international tournaments so far, compared to the 30 that the men have now played. Viewership for the men’s soccer games is double, at times even triple, that of women’s soccer. Men’s soccer is a much bigger deal, financially and otherwise, as FIFA’s $4.5 billion haul from the 2014 World Cup demonstrates.

3.) Misrepresenting opposing arguments

Plank only interviewed people who agree with her views, so it’s no surprise she spoke to the president and CEO of the Women’s Foundation, Teresa Younger. Younger, when prompted, remarked (predictably) that society values women’s work less. She also misrepresented the very solid data that show women work fewer hours than men.

“That assumption that women aren’t working as hard as the premise of the conversation is a farce,” Younger said. But that’s not the argument. The data are not ambiguous, and they come straight from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Year after year, women work fewer hours than men. That’s a fact. This is not saying women don’t work as hard, it’s saying that women don’t work as long as men each week. Not only are women more likely to seek part-time jobs, but they are also more likely to seek full-time jobs that don’t keep them in the office as many hours each week as their male peers.

Again, this is about choices that women make freely — and they have all kinds of sensible reasons for making them.

4.) Claiming society values the jobs women do less

This is one of the more original arguments presented in the video. Plank points to an article from The New York Times titled “As Women Take Over a Male-Dominated Field, the Pay Drops” as evidence that society values women’s work less.

The Times’ piece argues that declines in pay in various fields are driven by women entering those fields. But many examples mentioned in the Times article and the Vox video suggest confusion between cause and effect. It seems more likely that broader changes in the economy prompted men to stop seeking work in fields that became less lucrative, than that employers suddenly decided they could save money by hiring women.

Plank specifically points to one job mentioned in the Times piece — “ticket agent” — as an example of women being paid less when they move into a career. The article doesn’t elaborate on what sort of tickets, but this sounds like a classic case of a job that became obsolete, or for which computers made certain skills unnecessary. When a job’s remuneration changes, it’s not hard to see how it might start drawing a completely different pool of applicants.

This is even more obvious in reverse, when the Times brings up computer programming. “Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women,” wrote Times author Claire Cain Miller. “But when male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige.”

Unless you believe that software companies had a sudden fit of generosity when men started applying for the same jobs, this seems like a very obvious case of confusing cause with effect. The job description for a “programmer” seems to have changed dramatically, from a low-skill occupation that involved filing punchcards to a high-skill one that involved designing word processing programs, video games and social media platforms. It’s only natural that jobs in programming would come to attract a completely different set of applicants (perhaps more of them men, especially early on) who have training and skills that earlier “programmers” never needed.

Near the end, Plank attempts to pull a “the science is settled” moment. She says we should stop debating whether the wage gap exists, accept her conclusion that it does, and fix it.

But as with anything else, merely saying so doesn’t make it true, and certainly a video rife with such studied avoidance of data and serious counterarguments doesn’t settle the debate.

Real economic analyses of this question have been performed in the past, they’re just persistently ignored by Plank and others with a story to tell. Unlike this superficial Vox treatment, those analyses rely on data instead of anecdotes and ideologically charged hunches. Their findings have all been fairly similar, even when liberal women’s groups have done them.

The American Association of University Women, when it studied the question in 2012, found that after controlling for weekly hours and type of work, women actually make 93 cents for every dollar men make. And at least part of the seven-cent discrepancy they found was probably the result of their using over-broad industry categories to draw direct comparisons between very different kinds of jobs that men and women hold in vastly different proportions.

Of course, AAUW is a politically oriented and liberal group, and so it buried this statistical finding under a more sensational and less accurate headline suggesting a wage gap of nearly 20 cents. And that, like this Vox video, tells you just about everything you need to know about how this issue is debated and “explained.”

Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.