When pundits like David Brooks get sucked into the factoid-warp of Hanna Rosin (The End of Men) and Liza Mundy (The Richer Sex), they are always floored by the idea that young women earn more than young men. To them this represents the future. And woe to any woman trying to convince a jury she’s being discriminated against while these books are in the headlines. Brooks spelled it out real simple: “Women in their 20s outearn men in their 20s.”

That’s easily shown to be wrong (still holding my breath for the correction). But the more detailed factoid, the one you get in the long-soundbite version of the end-of-history, is that “median full-time wages for single childless women ages 22-30 exceeds those of single childless men in the same age group,” as reported in USA Today, for example. That was calculated by Reach Advisors using the American Community Survey.*

Making broad conclusions based on weird data slices is bad practice. And this is a great case study in why.

Who are those full-time working, not-married and childfree 20-somethings in metro areas? I ran that filter over the 2010 ACS data available from IPUMS, and this jumped out:

OK, so for whatever reason, notice that this group includes a disproportionate share of White women and Latino men. That turns out to be pivotal, since these particular Latino men have very low earnings. Check the earnings by race/ethnicity and gender:

So that’s it. The overall $1,000 advantage for women (seen in the bars on the far right) is the result of these particular Latino men’s low earnings. The high earnings of these White women are important, of course, they’re just not higher than White men’s. If you just look at Whites or Blacks there is no advantage for women.

I am all for getting into the problem of Latino men’s (and women’s) low average earnings. But that’s not where this story has been going. More than anything this is just shoddy statistical cherry-picking.

Hey media mega-conglomerates: give that meme a rest!

* Reach Advisors also limited the analysis to metro areas, so I did that as well. I don’t get as big an advantage for “women” as that reported in that 2010 USA Today article, which said it was based on 2008 data (they got an 8% gap, I get 3%). I don’t care to figure out exactly the source of the differences (and Reach hasn’t published their code).