Archimedes didn’t say, “Give me a bad statistic, and I
will move the Earth.” But that was only because the ancient Greek mathematician
wasn’t familiar with the ways of Washington.
An entire movement has grown up around the factoid that
American women make about 80 percent of the pay of men. It is a reliable
talking point of Democrats who insist the country is racked by a “War on
Women.” A raft of proposed legislation purports to remedy the discrimination
exposed by the damning number. It is the only bad statistic with a day devoted
to it, “Equal Pay Day,” which falls in April to signify how much longer women
have to work into the New Year to make what men earned in the previous year.
Tradition says that the day must be marked with wailing and gnashing of teeth,
and lots of press releases from advocacy organizations.
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow recently wielded the statistic
on Meet the Press, and reacted with shocked disbelief that anyone would
question such a cold, hard fact, as if it were as incontestable as the
circumference of the Earth.
Never mind that the figure is crude and misleading. The
latest data from the Labor Department say that women made 82.2 percent of what
men made in the first quarter of 2012. That’s a considerable gap, but comparing
all women versus all men is not particularly telling when all sorts of
variables — occupation, levels of experience, education, hours worked — are in
play.
“Women gravitate,” Carrie Lukas of the Independent
Women’s Forum writes, “toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable
conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility.
Simply put, many women — not all, but enough to have a big impact on statistics
— trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.”
The Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a feminist
outfit obsessed with the wage gap, published a study noting that twice as many
women as men work in jobs with median earnings below the federal poverty line
for a family of four. Unless all these women — some 5.5 million — were coerced
into these positions, this fact alone shows how occupational choice influences
the wage gap.
The slogan that invariably accompanies the 80 percent
statistic is “equal pay for equal work.” But men and women get paid differently
for different work. Warren Farrell points out in his book Why Men Earn More
that the 25 worst jobs in terms of stress and physical demands — occupations
such as sheet-metal worker and firefighter — are more than 90 percent male. In
general, men who are employed full-time work more hours a day than women
employed full-time (8.2 hours compared with 7.8, according to the Labor Department),
and women are much more likely to interrupt their careers to have children,
affecting their earning power over time.
All that notwithstanding, it is a strange time in history
for self-appointed advocates for women to feel oppressed on their behalf. They
must have missed the growing literature on “The End of Men” and similar themes.
Women earn about 60 percent of bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and are
reaching parity with men in medical and law schools. Their attitudes to work
are changing. In a historic reversal, more young women ages 18 to 34 (66
percent) than young men (59 percent) say high-paying work is one of the most
important things or very important, according to a new Pew survey.
In light of all this, it stands to reason that the wage
gap will narrow, even if it doesn’t disappear. A study by a research
organization called Reach Advisors shows that single women in their 20s make
105 percent of what single men in their 20s make in urban areas, and 120
percent “in certain cities with a heavily knowledge-driven employment base.”
These women must not realize that they will never make their way in the
workplace without Congress somehow acting to ensure “equal pay.”
In the end, the reality doesn’t matter. A bad statistic
never dies.
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