A Wonderful Racket
April 12, 2016
HAPPY EQUAL PAY DAY! Ashe Schow writes in The Washington Examiner:
When it’s pointed out that the gap [in pay of men and women] is due to women choosing different occupations, majors and number of hours worked, activists leap to a new argument, bizarrely claiming that women’s choices aren’t really their own. They try to explain that the reason nine of the top 10 highest paying fields are dominated by men and nine of the top 10 lowest paying fields are dominated by women is due to societal pressure — that women somehow aren’t responsible for their own decisions.
It must be a wonderful racket to dominate the media each year with spurious claims that women are helpless victims of society, forced to take teaching jobs not because they love children and teaching, but because “the man” makes them.
The activists make a point of using the widest measure of the gap possible — excluding things like differences in occupation, education, hours worked or time removed from the workforce. Otherwise, their “women as victims” narrative falls apart, as the Manhattan Institute’s Diana Furchtgott-Roth points out.
“When women are compared with men in the same jobs, with the same credentials, and the same job tenure, the wage gap practically disappears,” she wrote. When controlling for all those differences, there’s still a gap of three to six cents. That gap may be due to discrimination or some other factor still not controlled for.
The fact of the matter is that women aren’t getting hired for three-quarters of the cost it would take to hire a man. If that were the case, why would employers hire men, when they could just hire women and pay them less?
