Confusion on pay equity

The Connecticut Post editorial, “State on the right side of pay equity” revealed a profound confusion about the statistic featured at the center of its argument.

Starting from the statement, “the median woman earner in Connecticut made 85 cents on the dollar of the median man” found in a recent study, the editorial concluded that women are “working shoulder-to-shoulder with men ... there’s no excuse for them not reaping the same rewards”.

The confusion is that differences in the median do not mean that women are paid less for doing the same work. It has been the law since 1963 that women and men get equal pay for equal work.

Many women have sued and won settlements for pay discrimination. Most recent studies have found no statistically significant difference between wages paid to comparably qualified men and women for doing the same work.

Then why is the median income different? It is different because women work fewer hours, have fewer years of experience, and are more highly concentrated in lower paying professions.

The dearth of female plumbers, electricians, chemists, and system analysts goes a long way toward explaining the difference. Women who work only a few hours a day also depress the median wage earned by women.

Unless women sign up in greater numbers for STEM classes in college, they may be underrepresented in tech jobs in the future and a gap in the medi- an wage may persist.

The “median-based” logic of this editorial doesn’t hold. But if equal pay for equal work is the law of the land and has been for 55 years, and differences in the median don’t show there is any gender discrimination in wages, why do we need a new law? Ira Robbin Fairfield