President Obama wants to be fair to women and girls (men and boys are presumably on their own.). Toward that end last week he signed an Executive Order creating a new White House Council on Women and Girls. Its mission, an accompanying White House statement said, “will be to provide a coordinated federal response to the challenges confronted by women and girls and to ensure that all Cabinet and Cabinet-level agencies consider how their policies and programs impact women and families,” something that by implication has been heretofore ignored.
The Executive Order repeats the liberal mantra that
On average, American women continue to earn only about 78 cents for every dollar men make, and women are still significantly underrepresented in the science, engineering, and technology fields.
It does not pause to consider, much less refute, the accumulating evidence that this alleged pay gap virtually disappears when variables such as length of time in the work force and on a particular job, number of hours worked, jobs chose, etc., are taken into account. Pay gappers often attempt to refute this evidence by pointing to other data indicating a pay gap even among those who work full time, but that gap disappears the actual number of hours worked are considered.
The [Bureau of Labor Statistics] definition of full time work is 35 hours per week, and not all 52 weeks a year. Since more men work 40+ hours and 52 weeks a year, voila, women make less than men do.
In fact, workers who average 44 or more hours per week earn an average of 100% more than workers who average only 40 hours per week. Men in full-time jobs tend to work 4 to 10 more hours more per week than women in full-time jobs.
I could go on, but will mention only one other interesting example.
Warren Farrell was elected to the board of the National Organization for Women three times. Like a lot of men, he protested the fact that men earned a dollar for each 59 cents that women earned for the same work. He wondered why, forty years after the Federal Equal pay Act, hard-working women still got paid less than the guys on the job. His latest book suggests that it is not the result of rampant discrimination, but rather because of career choices women (and men) make.
Based on the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, that women earn 80 cents for every dollar men earn, Farrell figured he could start an all female firm and produce products for 80 cents that would cost an all male firm a dollar to produce. After three years of researching the U.S. Census Bureau statistics he found out that isn’t true, why it isn’t true, and what women can do to erase the pay gap, if they want to. He published his results in a book titled, Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap-and What Women Can Do About It.
…. He points out that many women make career choices that give them a better balance between work and life. He provides concrete examples of choices men make that earn higher pay than other men (the pay gap between never married and married men is bigger than between men and women) and he tells women how they can actually make more money than their male counterparts if they are prepared to make the same choices.
…. Ample studies document workplace discrimination against men and women because of their weight and against men (and seldom women) based on height. Racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination still exists as well. Farrell’s book, however, documents the much greater role that choice plays in maintaining the pay gap between men and women and it provides a roadmap for women who want to close the pay gap with men rather than simply complaining passively about that pay gap.
Let me now give the last, best word on this latest Obamapander to Roger Clegg, who commented on National Review Online’s The Corner earlier today:
The order repeats the canard that, “On average, American women continue to earn only about 78 cents for every dollar men make,” suggesting that “women earn less than men for the same work,” when in fact only a penny or two, if even that, of such a disparity can be ascribed to discrimination, as opposed to voluntary, individual decisions about career paths. It promises to “assist[] women-owned businesses to compete internationally”; of course, if in doing so the government excludes similarly situated men-owned businesses, it will be violating the Constitution and, if what’s involved is an “education program or activity,” Title IX as well. Finally, the executive order bemoans that “women are still significantly underrepresented in the science, engineering, and technology fields,” and so the Council will be “working to increase the participation of women in the science, engineering, and technology workforce.” This also suggests the Council will be encouraging discrimination as a response to nondiscrimination; but the good news is that the Council subgroup on the latter issue will be chaired by Larry Summers….
P.S. I’m just kidding with my ellipsis above. What Clegg actually wrote was “… will be chaired by Larry Summers (just kidding).”
ADDENDUM
I mentioned I could go on about this, but I really don’t want to. If I did, I would point to studies documenting the same conclusions Steve Chapman reaches in this excellent article debunking one of them. After analyzing some of the data he concludes with a couple of telling quotes:
I asked Harvard economist Claudia Goldin if there is sufficient evidence to conclude that women experience systematic pay discrimination. “No,” she replied. There are certainly instances of discrimination, she says, but most of the gap is the result of different choices. Other hard-to-measure factors, Goldin thinks, largely account for the remaining gap — “probably not all, but most of it.”
….
June O’Neill, an economist at Baruch College and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, has uncovered something that debunks the discrimination thesis. Take out the effects of marriage and child-rearing, and the difference between the genders suddenly vanishes. “For men and women who never marry and never have children, there is no earnings gap,” she said in an interview.
