On Tuesday, the nation’s grievance-mongers celebrated Equal Pay Day, the day up through which women must work to catch up with men’s earnings from the prior year. But based on the research on the subject, women would need to work only until about brunch on New Year’s Day.
Liberals have been bleating for decades about an apocryphal pay gap, whereby full-time working women earn just 77 cents for every dollar men earn for the same work.
In a desperate attempt to mobilize Democrats’ largest voting bloc in advance of the 2014 midterms, Obama recently signed an executive order banning federal contractors from prohibiting workers from discussing their pay and requesting pay statistics by gender.
Meanwhile, journalists have documented that the Obama White House has paid its female staffers less than men for years. So according to liberal logic, either Obama is discriminating against women applying for prestigious positions, or he’s stiffing them in their paychecks.
As journalist Christina Hoff Summers and others have documented, women’s work habits and life circumstances differ from men’s in many ways that affect their earnings.
Women tend to pick lower-paying careers, and to major in subjects that lead to lower-paying jobs. Men are more likely to choose careers that involve difficult manual labor or dangerous work conditions, which yield them extra compensation relative to safe desk jobs. Women are more likely to interrupt their careers to give birth and stay home to rear children. Women sometimes choose to work fewer hours than men.
Controlling for the above factors, the gender gap dwindles to 6.6 cents.
“[T]he raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action…,” the U.S. Department of Labor admitted in 2009. “The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.”
Conservatives have been pointing out these facts for years — all to no avail. Joan Walsh recently sneered at Republicans for telling women to stop lying about the pay gap. Birth control connoisseur Sandra Fluke outlined all the steps we can take to reduce the pay gap.
Yet as Megan McArdle points out, the real pay gap is the one that results from the differences between women and men, and the divergent life choices they make. The Left doesn’t want women to receive the same pay as men for equal work; they want women to receive the same pay as men for unequal work.
And these appeals to ‘social justice’ that rest on an assumption that women can’t compete on their own terms come from the ones who claim to be feminists.
