“Everyone is in favor of free speech… but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.” ― Winston Churchill
…if you consider occupation, hours worked, experience, education, job security, work safety, working conditions, and continuous length of time in the workplace. None of which factor into the feminist mythology of “equal pay day.”
If women did the same work as well or better than men for lower compensation, why would the patriarchal capitalist oppressors hire men?
Put another way, women as a group would rather have a Masters in Education than in Engineering.
In a decade, I’ve become tired of writing about the lie of the “wage gap.” So, here’s all the information you need to make an informed decision. Call it an appeal to the authority of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics.
To do equal work, on average, women would have to toil 7 hours more per week, increase their exposure to job related injury and death by a factor of 13 and substantially increase their risk of being laid off during economic downturns.
The “wage gap” promoters ignore such relevant variables as industry, occupation, continuous years in the workforce, level of education, field of study and experience. 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.
There is no wage gap.
TOC hasn’t noted these feminist fantasies for awhile, so… The Equal Pay Day Reality Check
RTWT
And check out Carpe Diem’s note:
1. On average, men work 5.6 more hours per week than women—the equivalent of seven additional weeks of full-time work per year (see chart above). That would put “Equal Work Day” at the end of February, symbolizing how far the average women would have to work into 2010 to equal the same number of hours that the average man worked in 2009.
2. The unemployment rate for men has been greater than the jobless rate for women for the last 40 months, and job losses during the depth of the last recession were four times greater for men.
3. There were 1,277 male occupational fatalities in 2008 for every 100 female work-related deaths, a ratio of almost 13:1.
An important question then for women on Equal Pay Day: Would perfect labor market equality really be worth it if it meant working 280 more hours per year, having a much greater chance of being unemployed during recessions, and being significantly more exposed to work-related injury and death?
Maybe they would, but they never mention it.
A letter I wrote to the Lansing State Journal appeared there on May 7th:
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:
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