The wage gap is ‘a myth’
Time for the journalism janitor to clean up the mess that was “Close the Wage Gap Once and for All.” (Editorial, April 10.)
The American Association of University Women study citing women earning 77 percent of what men earn was derived from taking the total earnings by men and women and dividing them by the numbers of workers from each gender. Period — no variables taken into account.
In that same study, when the choices made by male and female workers were factored in, the wage gap narrowed to a slender 6.6 percent.
That fact was presented by “real feminist” Christina Hoff Summers in a popular PragerU video from March, 2017. The following are other inconvenient truths brought to light by Ms. Summers.
In 2009 the U.S. Dept. of Labor did an examination of more than 50 peer-reviewed studies on the “wage gap.” The conclusion drawn by the examiners was the differences in wages “may be almost entirely the result of individual choices being made by both male and female workers.”
Their estimation of the real wage gap was between 4.8 and 7 percent.
In the field of nursing, she noted the opinion of Professor Linda Aiken of the University of Pennsylvania. Prof. Aiken stated: “Career choices and educational differences explain most, if not all, of the gender gap in nursing.”
Male nurses generally chose more lucrative specialties, worked longer hours and were more amenable to moving to areas where they could earn more.
A recent Harvard University study by Valentin Bolotnyy and Natalia Emanuel made an apples-to-apples comparison of male and female bus and train operators at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MTBA) during the years of 2011-2017.
The MTBA is a union shop with uniform
hourly wages with men and women adhering to the same rules and receiving the same benefits.
The authors’ conclusion: “The gap of $0.89 in our setting can be explained entirely by the fact that, while having the same choice sets in the workplace, women and men made different choices.”
Here are some of those choices.
⏩ Male train and bus drivers worked about 83 percent more overtime than their female co-workers and were twice as likely to work an overtime shift on short notice.
⏩ Twice as many women as men never took overtime.
⏩ Male workers took 48 percent fewer unpaid hours under the Family Medical Leave Act every year.
⏩ Fathers more often accepted overtime than childless men. Conversely, mothers were less amenable to working overtime than childless women. Fathers chose overtime and mothers chose family time.
The Hearst Connecticut Editorial Board and the rest of the elite left are ignoring two basic social precepts.
The first is that men and women are different. The second is the fact that differences between men and women aren’t some kind of affliction in need of treatment.
However, readers of this paper get the cheerleader treatment for the wizened, hipster, millionaire Socialist Rosa DeLauro when she does her preening and pandering for the awaiting media.
We didn’t get any indication what those four loopholes in the Equal Pay Act of 1963 are or exactly how the wondrous Paycheck Fairness Act would remedy them. We can only guess.
Putting the word “fairness” in the title of a bill is supposed to be the magic bullet to cure whatever malady exists. Any principled opposition to said bill means that the opponent is the cankered fruit from the poison tree.
Yes, daughters are capable of great things. But today’s so called progressives are telling us that our sons and daughters aren’t really sons or daughters. They’re whatever they feel like they are at that moment. Masculinity is toxic and needs to be remediated. If a daughter thinks motherhood is her highest calling, then somebody failed to make her realize that a four-year degree is what she really should want.
The real problem we have in America is that more and more millennial males are foregoing college, marriage and even dating because they don’t see the point in stepping up to the plate and striving to emulate traditionally strong American men. It’s not a mythical wage gap touted by tub-thumping leftists.
Fathers chose overtime and mothers chose family time.