Wage Gaffe

A letter I wrote to the Lansing State Journal appeared there on May 7th:

Gap claims hollow

It’s being reported women are paid less than men because employers discriminate against females. A paper from the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation is being used as evidence for this claim. An unreported statement from that study:

“After accounting for all factors known to affect wages, about one-quarter of the gap remains unexplained and may be attributed to discrimination.” In other words, three-fourths of the gap does not arise from discrimination, and we have no idea whether discrimination accounts for any part of the remainder. It may be that the AAUW’s bias leads it to reach a conclusion for which it has no evidence.

Evidence that a wage gap may not be attributed to discrimination by employers comes from June O’Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and Baruch College economist: “For men and women who never marry and never have children, there is no earnings gap.”

Duane Hershberger
Williamston

Today a discerning reader named Paul R. Neirink commented on it:

LSJ, hire reader

After reading Duane Hershberger’s May 7 letter, I could not help but think the LSJ really ought to hire Hershberger as a reporter.

His letters to the editor and occasional Viewpoints are consistently better written, more intelligent and better researched than any of the political propaganda regularly presented by the LSJ as legitimate news.

Paul R. Neirink
Grand Ledge

Thanks, Paul. Your letter did lead to two things. One, an OpEd submission to the LSJ I would otherwise have posted, and two, a link on the topic of the “wage gap.”

Equal Pay Day
By Ashley Herzog

An excerpt, but read the whole thing.

…First, the belief that employers get away with paying women 77 percent of what men make can only be explained by a lack of understanding of basic economic principles. If it were true, money-grubbing employers would hire only women, since it would lower costs and increase profits. We know that doesn’t happen, so feminists have invented a preposterous explanation: male businessmen care so much about keeping women “in their place” that they’re willing to lose money by hiring men. Is it just me, or do people like Donald Trump seem slightly more concerned with getting rich than maintaining patriarchy? Already, the pay gap theory has serious flaws.

Second, the 77 cents to the dollar figure is calculated by comparing the average salaries of all men to all women. It does not account for occupation, education, the number of hours worked, or the different roles that jobs play in men’s and women’s lives. The average woman earns less because she’s made different choices in life – a fact that feminists, despite all their caterwauling about the importance of “choice,” refuse to accept.

…no significant study has ever found that women with the same education and experience, who work the same number of hours, earn less than their male colleagues. Both O’Neill and Farrell identified several jobs where women actually out-earn men.

H/T Bizzyblog