Masters denies any gender pay gap. Really?

Women of the world, rejoice.

All those years you thought you were making less money than the guys who do the same job as you?

Turns out you’re the victim not of a gender pay disparity but of a “fake leftwing narrative,” according to Blake Masters, one of several Arizona Republicans hoping to upend Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly this fall.

Masters is a 35-year-old venture capitalist, a political neophyte who is hoping to ride his mentor Peter Thiel’s millions into the U.S. Senate. He has spent much time of late explaining to us mere women that we have no constitutional right to abortion or contraception (though, thankfully, he assures us he’s not looking to outlaw condoms).

Now, in video aired on Wednesday by NBC’s Vaughn Hillyard, Masters explains why there’s no need to spell out in the Constitution that we should have equal rights to men.

“Women are not paid less in America than men,” Masters said, during a February candidate forum in Scottsdale. “It’s a left-wing narrative, this gender pay gap. When you control for the occupations, when you control for people taking time out to, you know, birth children, things are actually pretty equal. And men do the most dangerous jobs.”

Like, for example, explaining to women how we are paid really, really well, given who we are and what we do?

Masters just kept digging.

“Men are the ones who are doing risky, you know, fishing crab in Alaska,” he explained, during that Feb. 4 forum. “And sometimes those jobs pay more. Sometimes those jobs pay more, and so I think we got to push back on the fake left-wing narrative that women don’t have equal rights in this country.”

Meanwhile, here in the real world, study after study shows that while the gender pay gap has narrowed over time, it still exists and hasn’t budged in the last 15 years. That’s no small thing when you’re a single mom who has to work an extra 42 days just to match the salary of a male co-worker.

Or longer, if you’re a woman of color. Women earned 84% of what men earned in 2020, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full- and parttime workers.

The U.S. Census Bureau, in its study of full-time, year-round employees, says women earned 83 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2019.

Some of that is, no doubt, attributable to differences in education, occupation and the demands of motherhood. But studies have shown the gender pay gap exists even among workers who are doing the same job,

in the same place, for the same employer.

“In the U.S., men earn on average 24.1 percent higher base pay than women in Glassdoor salaries,” according to a study by Glassdoor, a jobs website. “That amounts to women earning about 76 cents per dollar earned by men. However, once we compare workers with similar age, education and years of experience, that gap shrinks to 19.2 percent. Going further, when we compare workers with the same job title, employer and location, the U.S. gender pay gap is about 5.4 percent.”

In other words, it still exists.

I put in a call to Masters on Thursday, hoping to talk to him about his views on the apparently nonexistent gender gap and where he gets his information. If he gets back to me, I’ll update.

While we wait, consider that the median salary for Arizona men was $50,069 in 2019, according to the Census Bureau. Women, meanwhile, earned just $41,617.

Apparently, the crab fishing is pretty good out there in the desert.