A little late to the discussion, but April 2 was Equal Pay Day. The general theme is equal pay for equal work, which no one disagrees with. That event also provided an opportunity for victimhood-pushing feminists, grandstanding politicians, and other assorted virtual signalers to insist that women only earn 78 cents (or some such increment) for every dollar a man makes. This shortfall allegedly creates a gender pay gap or wage gap.
Let’s stipulate that effectively negotiating salary can be awkward for women and men. Let’s also stipulate that unethical, devious or arbitrary employers in the contemporary workplace can sometimes take advantage of both men and women when it comes to hiring, pay, or promotions. Even some employees who have legitimate beefs in this regard often can’t obtain legal redress either. Ironically perhaps, Google recently discovered that it was underpaying men for doing similar work as female employees.
Wage discrimination has been illegal in the U.S. since 1963.
A Pro-Choice Scenario
The real issue, it seems, is not rampant sexism or unequal pay for equal work, but a lifestyle-driven earnings gap, which otherwise pro-choice feminists and conventional wisdom/ignorance fails to take into account.
From the Independent Women’s Forum as published by The Daily Caller:
“The Department of Labor compiled more than 50 peer-reviewed studies and concluded that the often-cited 77 cents on the dollar gap — calculated by comparing the average female wage with the average male one — was “almost entirely” the result of differing career choices rather than discrimination.
“Despite earning more degrees than their male counterparts, America women continue to frustrate left-wing feminists by making different work-life balance decisions. When given the same choices as men, women select different fields of study, value flexibility over salary, work fewer hours, and avoid physically dangerous employment.
Four out of five of the top-paying college majors have large majorities of male students, while the reverse is true of the five lowest-paid majors, where women boast large majorities in all but one. Women take about twice as many unpaid hours off, and men work 83 percent more overtime. And a plurality of mothers with young children still report that their ideal situation involves part-time, not full-time, work… When women are free to choose their own hours and work environments, they consistently choose differently than men.
And who’s to say they’re wrong? It’s odd that liberal feminists, who cast themselves as defenders of a victimized sisterhood, define success purely through a traditional masculine lens and are so unwilling to validate the choices made by real-life women across the country.And yet, despite a mountain of evidence, Americans will see the myth of the wage gap perpetuated every year with the celebration of “Equal Pay Day.”…
“Proponents of ‘Equal Pay Day’ and the Paycheck Fairness Act will use the platform to encourage the freest, most prosperous, most privileged generation of women that has ever existed in human history to think of themselves as victims of systemic sexism in the workplace. In reality, rather than waging a war against sexist discrimination, Equal Pay Day sends the message that unless women make the same decisions as men when it comes to work and family,..
“Individual cases aside, the wage gap doesn’t represent the victimization of women in the United States. Instead, it is simply a reminder that on the whole, when freed from the constraints of subsistence poverty and given the opportunity, men and women take different paths in life.
The essay adds that if Congress tries to solve the pay gap with feel-good legislation, lawyers will be the only cohort to see their earnings increase.
Harvard Studies Focuses on Equal Pay
In late 2018, two researchers from Harvard, an otherwise of bastion of political correctness, published a revealing study on the gender wage gap.
The Foundation for Economic Education summarized what the economics professors found:
“They look[ed] at data from the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA). This is a union shop with uniform hourly wages where men and women adhere to the same rules and receive the same benefits. Workers are promoted on the basis of seniority rather than performance, and male and female workers of the same seniority have the same choices for scheduling, routes, vacation, and overtime. There is almost no scope here for a sexist boss to favor men over women.
“And yet, even here, [the authors] find that female train and bus operators earn less than their male counterparts. From this observation, they go looking for possible causes, examining time cards and scheduling from 2011 to 2017 and factoring in sex, age, date of hire, tenure, and whether an employee was married or had dependents.
“They find that male train and bus drivers worked about 83 percent more overtime than their female colleagues and were twice as likely to accept an overtime shift—which pays time-and-a-half—on short notice and that around twice as many women as men never took overtime. The male workers took 48 percent fewer unpaid hours off under the Family Medical Leave Act each year. Female workers were more likely to take less desirable routes if it meant working fewer nights, weekends, and holidays. Parenthood turns out to be an important factor. Fathers were more likely than childless men to want the extra cash from overtime, and mothers were more likely to want time off than childless women. In other words, the difference in male and female earnings at the MBTA was explained by those “so-called ‘women’s choices…”
