Vox is a website staffed by people who think they are the elite guard of social justice, but who are in fact some of the dumbest people ever to have been awarded an internet connection and a WordPress login.

Latest exhibit: they just accidentally — and quite comprehensively! — debunked the wage gap, a persistent liberal conspiracy theory that the “explainer” site has nonetheless sought to defend for years.

In a story filled with cute stick figures probably designed to distract from the inconvenient facts, Sarah Kliff lays out what she thinks is a clear explanation of the wage gap, which instead acts as a refutation.

The story highlights the critical fact that men are willing to work “particular hours,” which means long and inflexible shifts, being on call 24/7, and especially taking those ugly shifts that no right-thinking person (male or female) would actually choose to do. Women are less likely to do these, in many cases owing to family responsibilities.

But these responsibilities are life choices a woman makes, and they are not specific to her gender. After all, we’re constantly being told that men should do more in the home, and that women can have it all at work, aren’t we? How can differences in pay thanks to differing life choices possibly be called bias? No one seems able to say.

Kliff even concedes some of the things I’ve talked about for ages— men negotiate their pay more often than women. (Whose fault is that?) They skirt the issue of dangerous jobs, since that would make the destruction of their argument even clearer: men are paid higher to do dangerous jobs resulting in the vast majority of workplace deaths. 97 per cent of workplace fatalities are male.

A source for this article, professor Claudia Goldin, believes the answer is policies that will make hours more equally valuable to companies. Academics and the government just love attempting to manipulate the free market, don’t they?

Unfortunately for them, what every communist except apparently Bernie Sanders has eventually learned is that you can’t manipulate the free market with any success. Social engineering experiments either fail expensively or damage the companies engaged in them. Just look at the stock of Twitter, which is run as an ideological clubhouse for the left’s pet projects.

Or consider another brief example of how the market works. A customer service manager handling a call center for an electric company will never truly be as valuable to the electric company as a rugged individual tasked with going out in a raging storm at 3:00 AM to fix broken equipment and restore service. That individual will also be more valuable to the company than an employee with similar skills who performs routine maintenance in the daytime.

The genders of those three employees have nothing to do with their value. Their value to the organization, the choices they make that influence that value, and their insistence of getting the best compensation from their employer through negotiation are what drive their pay.

If women don’t choose to do jobs like that, and instead opt for easier work, or part-time work with comfier benefits and more job security — research shows that women are disproportionately likely to work for the government and far less likely to work for themselves or start a business — they have only themselves to blame.

The gender wage gap is taken as an article of faith on the political left. Which makes sense, when you understand how these people think: “Western culture is a cis-het white patriarchal nightmare of bias against women drenched in toxic masculinity that suffocates and oppresses The Divine And Ineffably Perfect Female Essence, therefore there must be gender discrimination in wages.”

Perhaps the hysteria liberals apply to the subject is a sort of sublimated guilt. After all, the most high-profile places to have rare, genuine wage gaps include Hillary Clinton’s senate office with its 28 per cent wage gap and good old Gawker.

There is an overall earnings gap in America, like any western country, but it is a value gap. Cases in which women are paid less than men for exactly the same work are vanishingly few.

The thing is, companies don’t care who you are, they care about what your value is. Because the free market runs on money, not blog posts and hugs. Kliff lays this out clearly, if unintentionally: the earnings gap exists because men are more likely to do things that provide high value to their employer.

Want to turn that around? Get up off your asses, ladies, and work as hard as we do. Thanks for the heads-up and the admission Vox. We get the message. Women need to pick different jobs and start working as hard as men do, or accept that their different roles in the furtherance of our species might just mean that they don’t take home as much cash at the end of the month.

This, apparently, counts as a revelation to the gaggle of drooling, retarded children we call “the American media.”

Want to close wage gap? Step one: Change your major from feminist dance therapy to electrical engineering. #NationalOffendACollegeStudentDay — Christina Sommers (@CHSommers) November 10, 2015

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