Carrie Lukas makes the case that the male-female wage gap doesn’t exist:
Feminist hand-wringing about the wage gap relies on the assumption that the differences in average earnings stem from discrimination. Thus the mantra that women make only 77% of what men earn for equal work. But even a cursory review of the data proves this assumption false.
The Department of Labor’s Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.
Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate 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 the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.
April 13th, 2011 | 9:38 am
This is rather old news. Economists have known for some time that, when one compensates for all variables and compares apples to apples, women make as much money as men in same position who have worked the same number of hours for the same number of years.
However, many women at a given age have not worked the same number of hours over the same number of years as men of the same age because women have taken time off to raise children, or do not wish to put in the same number of hours as their male counterparts for other reasons.
This reflects the reality of female biology and priorities, but certain doctrinaire feminists believe it constitutes a societal bias (as thought men could get pregnant) and demand that women should be paid the same as men even when they have not worked as long or as hard to get to their position. If effect, while calling for equality of the sexes, they actually advocate discrimination against men.
April 13th, 2011 | 9:39 am
The biological reality is that women who choose to have children are going to earn less over the course of their lifetime.
The economic reality is that in most settings where risk and long hours are the case, it is typical to find that the jobs full of the risks and the long hours are overwhelmingly held by men, while women are more likely to work “up front” or “in the office”.
This is why partnerships are necessary – because men and women cannot split the costs of procreation equally, therefore one unit dividing the labor is more efficient and brings advantages to both the man and the woman.
Feminists want the advantages of being independent – of not having to form an alliance, not having to trust, not having to depend on a partner who might betray. But since women bear a greater burden in the act of procreation – and thus are prone to earn less money over the course of a lifetime – feminists believe they are entitled to be compensated somehow.
This is what men used to do: compensate for the imbalance. But feminists want someone else – the government, or the employer – to compensate, so that they can “have it all”.
April 13th, 2011 | 10:46 am
“This is what men used to do: compensate for the imbalance. But feminists want someone else – the government, or the employer – to compensate, so that they can “have it all”.”
This was the basis of the feminist scheme to change the law to require equal pay for equivalent work–a monstrous idea that, fortunately, was strangled in its crib. In essence, it required federal bureaucrats to determine which conventionally male jobs were “equivalent” to conventionally female jobs, and require employers to pay workers in equivalent jobs the same salary. As soon as somebody actually tried to determine which jobs were equivalent to each other, the entire scheme collapsed of its own weight–there was not, and could never be, any unanimity on the question of job equivalence.
Unable to circumvent the reality that women tended to gravitate to less demanding–and therefore less well compensated–employment, feminists then resorted to demanding quotas for women in traditionally male dominated jobs. Here, of course, they were also rowing upstream, since relatively few women want to do those dirty jobs.
April 13th, 2011 | 1:05 pm
Coincidentally, the blog of “Christians” for Biblical Equality is this week discussing an Australian study which, horror of horrors, shows tha feminist men make *less* than men who have a more traditional view of women’s place in the world.
Funny that.
April 13th, 2011 | 1:12 pm
correction: it appears the study is a US study. The auther of the blog post is Australian.
April 14th, 2011 | 9:53 pm
The 77% percent statistic that is thrown around is clearly overblown, but there is actually still good evidence that there is a wage gap that can’t be attributed to the factors discussed in this article. Wikipedia actually has a pretty good breakdown of what the research says and all the factors that need to be looked at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male%E2%80%93female_income_disparity_in_the_United_States
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