Unbearable Acts of Paycheck Unfairness
February 12, 2014

MIDDLE class men can’t even dream in many cases of supporting a family without sending their wives to work. But what worries Claudia Goldin, president of the American Economic Association and a professor at Harvard? She is concerned that women lawyers and corporate executives, who clearly work fewer hours and less continuous hours than men, are not making enough money relative to men.
In her recent paper, risibly titled “A Grand Gender Convergence,” Goldin becomes the fourteenth million academic to study pay differentials between men and women. She throws all kinds of figures into the computer, which is the looking glass of future equality. She uses these figures with the assumption that men and women are autonomous units and not interdependent. The fact that many men are supporting women is not something that seems to cross her mind. Goldin found that women are “converging” with men in that they have equal salaries in most professions until that point in which women start working fewer hours or more “flexible” hours. That’s not right. That’s not right. The business world should not be structured in such a way that it rewards people who are around when their employers need them.
Goldin writes:
“[T]he gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours or worked particular hours. Such change has already occurred in various sectors, but not in enough.”
She disgracefully evades the issue as to how companies are going to accomplish certain tasks when employees are not around with lots of graphs and charts.