It's March 20th, colloquially known as 4:20 and everyone knows what is celebrated today. Yes, it is Equal Pay Day, the day where we reflect on how women supposedly make only 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. Why, what did you think this post was going to be about?
According to a report by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) Educational Foundation, "One year out of college, women working full-time earn only 80 percent as much as their male colleagues earn. Ten years after graduation, women fall farther behind, earning only 69 percent as much as men earn."
The data seems to imply either a lack of opportunity for women or outright discrimination. However, the data for college enrollments show that 57% of college undergraduates are women and that number is climbing. Certainly then, it is not a lack of opportunities that women face. Given that a college education should supposedly raise one's earning potential, is this even more damning evidence that discrimination is keeping the ladies down? Not when you look more closely at the data.
The study notes some difference in male/female employment which explain much of the gap. First off, men and women are not compared with careers held constant, it is an overall number of all men and all women. The report admits that women seek employment statistically slanted towards education, psychology, the humanities, nonprofit groups and local governments which typically pay less than the sectors preferred by men, such as engineering, math, and business.
The one year out of college pay difference of 20% also makes more sense in light of the average hours worked. The report admits that a year out of college, notes AAUW, women in full-time jobs work an average of 42 hours a week, compared to 45 for men. Men are also far more likely to work more than 50 hours a week.
A decade after graduation, women make fully 31 percent less than men but this too is explained in the fine print of the report. A decade after graduation, only 3% of men have left the workforce or are working part time as compared to a whopping 39% of women. Those women who return to the workforce after being gone for so long, typically due to child-rearing, understandably make less than the men who never left.
Although the headline of the report trumpets discrimination at the hands of men, the text admits that "After accounting for all factors known to affect wages, about one-quarter of the gap remains unexplained and may be attributed to discrimination." So by the feminists own reasoning, the 23 cent gap is only less than a 6 cent gap and even that only may be discrimination. June O'Neill, an economist at Baruch College and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, has done more independent research on the subject and comes to a fairly unsurprising conclusion, "For men and women who never marry and never have children, there is no earnings gap."
For years feminists have tried to act as though there are no inherent differences between men and women, possibly excepting that men are evil. False facts are constructed to distort the overall picture. A 2007 study reported that 51% of women were now choosing to live without a spouse. A New York Times correction noted: "A front-page article and chart on Jan. 16 about the rising number of women in the United States living without spouses referred imprecisely to ages of the women included in the Census Bureau survey that was the basis of the finding. The women were 15 and older." Imagine that, when girls as young as 15 are included, most women are unmarried.
I'm not a feminist, I'm a libertarian. I support everyone's right to choose their own path by their individual decisions and not because of outside influence. Feminists, on the other hand, seem much more interested in generating false data to support their own conclusions about trends they would prefer to see in society. Unbiased studies show again and again that women choose to make different lifestyle choices than men, that may change with time or it may not. Regardless, as long as women are free to choose their education level, careers, and life decisions without undue interference or artificial barriers they have true equality of opportunity. Equalizing outcomes is a fool's errand and could only succeed by seeking to take away the freedom of choice that early feminists justly fought for.
A NOTE TO MY READERS: Between 2007 and 2010, Equal Pay Day was observed on March 20. In 2011, the date was moved to March 12. I became aware of this after Equal Pay Day had passed by reading this article which was not used as a reference within this column but is an excellent companion piece. It seems that, just like with anti-war protests, it is only cool for to hold rallies for the supposedly disenfranchised when the President is a Republican. If I missed it even though I was expecting it, I can't imagine too many other people even knew it existed. Although I used feminists' own statistics to debunk their bogus findings, the Wall Street Journal uses Department of Labor statistics to suggest women actually make 8% more than men in the cohort of 22-30 year old urban childless workers. They also found the unemployment rate to be 1% higher among men because of the different fields dominated by either sex, a fact I can't help notice men don't seem to be marching in the street about. Happy Equal Pay Day, sort of.
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