Blog Post

AEIdeas

The American Association of University Women (AAUW) is a major participant in the feminist propaganda machine that mobilizes its forces every April and engages in statistical falsehoods to publicize the bogus feminist holiday event known as Equal Pay Day. AAUW executive director Linda Hallman made this statement recently:

Think about it: Women have to work almost four months longer than men [until today, April 14] do to earn the same amount of money [as men] for doing the same job. What’s more, we have to set aside a day each year just to call the nation’s attention to it.

Hallman’s statement is a statistical fairy tale because it’s based on the false assumption that women get paid 23% less than men for doing exactly the same work in the exact same occupations and careers, working side-by-side with men on the same job for the same organization, working the same number of hours per week, traveling the same amount of time for work obligations, with the same exact work experience and education, with exactly the same level of productivity, etc. In other words, the AAUW and others assumes that employers all across America are using coupons like the one above to get a 23% wage discount for every woman they hire, and it’s that rampant and blatant gender discrimination that is the culprit behind the gender pay gap. For example, Sen. Gary Peters (MI-D) said that “Today, April 14th marks Equal Pay Day, the date by which women have made up for the wage discrimination they suffered during the previous year.” That’s complete statistical nonsense.

The reality is that you can only find a 23% gender pay gap by comparing raw, aggregate, unadjusted full-time median salaries, i.e. when you control for NOTHING that would help explain gender differences in salaries like:

Hours Worked: The average man working full-time worked two more hours per week in 2013 compared to the average woman, see my analysis here.

Type of Work: As I reported yesterday, men represented 93% of workplace fatalities in 2013 (and the male share of job-related deaths has been consistently that high in every previous year) because men far outnumber women in the most dangerous occupations like logging, mining and roofing that have the greatest probability of job-related injury or death.

Marriage and Motherhood: a) single women who have never married earned 95.2% of male earnings in 2013; b) more women than men leave the labor force temporarily for child birth, child care and elder care, and c) women, especially working mothers, tend to value “family friendly” workplace policies more than men, according this Department of Labor study.

Most economic studies that control for all of those variables conclude that gender discrimination accounts for only a very small fraction of gender pay differences, and may not even be a statistically significant factor at all. For example, as Andrew Biggs and I pointed out in the WSJ a year ago:

In a comprehensive study that controlled for most of the relevant labor market variables simultaneously—such as that from economists June and Dave O’Neill for the American Enterprise Institute in 2012—nearly all of the 23% raw gender pay gap cited by the UUAW can be attributed to factors other than discrimination. The O’Neills conclude that, “labor market discrimination is unlikely to account for more than 5% but may not be present at all.”

On Equal Pay Day, when groups like the AAUW point to a 23% unadjusted gender pay gap and demand that the pay gap be completely eliminated, what they are really saying is that they want women to:

Work longer hours on average like men do;

Work in riskier, less safe occupations like logging and commercial fishing like men do where the chances of getting injured or killed are much greater;

Work in more physically demanding occupations like farming, construction, roofing, logging and working on oil rigs, where they’d be working alongside men outside in 100 degree weather in the summer and below zero weather in the winter;

Work less in family-friendly workplace environments like teaching elementary school that coincide with their children’s schedules (with summers off, etc.), and work more in less family-friendly workplace environments like being an over-the-road truck driver or being an oil field worker.

Take less time off, or no time off, for child birth and child care to minimize their time away from the labor force that might affect their earnings.

Bottom Line: Those who publicize Equal Pay Day and demand that the unadjusted 23% pay gap be reduced to zero are unknowingly really advocating that men and women play completely interchangeable roles in the labor market and identical roles in their family responsibilities; and that’s an outcome I don’t think most women (or men) really want. As the Department of Labor concluded in 2009, “The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.” They also concluded that “the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action.” Like for example the proposed corrective action known as The Paycheck Fairness Act, which is being promoted today on Equal Pay Day.