What is the true gender pay gap?

It’s 2% for comparable work, and it is shrinking.

These people are really struggling to find outrage in those facts. Check out the wording of their summary:

“When men and women with the same employment characteristics do similar jobs, women earn $0.98 for every dollar earned by an equivalent man. In other words, a woman who is doing the same job as a man, with the exact same qualifications as a man, is still paid two percent less. Unfortunately, this controlled wage gap has only shrunk by a miniscule (sic) amount of $0.008 since 2015.”

Ah, math! How tricky thou art! That .008 is not that minuscule at all. That means the gap went from .028 to .020. Another way to word that could be “The gap has shrunk by nearly 30% in four years.” That’s quite a different spin, isn’t it?

The bottom line is that the gender PAY gap itself is 2% and shrinking, and that is almost insignificant. What is NOT minuscule is the gender EMPLOYMENT gap. While women make essentially the same pay as men when they work comparable jobs, the real problem is getting those comparable jobs in the first place. That’s the heart of the issue. Peddling the myth of the pay gap only distracts from recognizing the employment gap, which is anything but a myth. Women don’t make as much as men on the average, and the difference is significant, but it has almost nothing to do with equal pay for equal work. It is true because of complex issues related to women’s general lack of power in the corporate world and in society in general, and the corresponding lack of monetary respect for female-dominated professions.

2 thoughts on “What is the true gender pay gap?

  1. Men and women, on average, make different choices when it comes to career choices. They also often make different choices inside of those careers. When I graduated from law school over 20 years ago, nearly all top firms started associates at $125,000/year. But such associates would routinely work over 80 hours/week, some over 100. Such associates could make partner after 7 years. Many women would work just as hard as men and make just as much money. But others would take time off to raise a family. Even women that go right back to work after a few months maternity leave often choose to work fewer hours. That might involve switching to a job that expects fewer hours. They may stay with the same firm but move to a non-partnership track or they may still be on that track but take longer to make partner. There is nothing wrong with any of these choices, but the resulting lower compensations are not necessarily evidence of gender discrimination either.

    There are also on average gender differences in interests. I have a niece in middle school that is very smart, gets excellent grades but has zero interest in STEM fields. My sister tells me she is very much “anti-STEM.” Ironically, both her parents are engineers. I have 2 sisters, while one is an engineer, the other is an elementary school teacher. Guess which one gets paid more? My teacher sister had no interest in a STEM career. I think we need to make sure that women and girls are in no way discouraged from pursuing interests in STEM. Men in these fields have an obligation to make sure that women in these fields are not made to feel unwelcome in their “boys’ clubs.” But gender differences in interests should not be used to argue that gender discrimination is the cause. But if you want to start paying first year teachers like first year associates at big law firms I’m all for it. Or at least I would be if I could afford the tax hikes.

  2. And then there’s the other shoe: there isn’t some invisible wall causing that employment gap. It’s caused by the fact that women and men greatly prefer different jobs, especially in the higher wage scales. I’m a techie wage slave. I’ve worked with women for decades…in small numbers. Why? Women don’t have a huge interest in being techie wage slaves.

    This is because women are smarter than men.

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