If you want a clear picture of the dishonesty of the political Left, look no further than the continued claims of a gender wage gap. Economists, scholars, and anyone with a brain has debunked the claim that women are paid less than men for doing the same job, yet Democrat politicians and their media counterparts continue to spread this idea.
On Thursday, twice failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton put out a tweet supporting the House-passed “Paycheck Fairness Act” (more on that in a minute). She included a chart meant to prove that women are paid less for the same work as men.
“It’s pretty simple: Men and women in the same job should get the same pay. The House has passed the #PaycheckFairnessAct to help make equal pay a reality. It’s 2019! Let’s get it done.”
Well, it’s not “pretty simple,” because Clinton’s tweet is misleading or wrong on so many levels.
First, men and women in the same job should not always get the same pay, as other factors (such as experience and job performance) should be included in someone’s salary. Sometimes that will mean a man is paid more, but other times it will mean a woman is paid more. Paying people the same regardless of talent or experience actually hurts workers, who realize nothing they do actually matters to their employer.
Second, the chart she included does not compare what men and women are paid for doing the same job, it compares the average or median earnings of men and women (depending on what source she used for the chart). The chart compares what the sexes and various minorities earn on average compared to “a white man.”
Right off the bat, the chart shows that Asian men earn more than white men, yet the chart is made to attack white men.
The reason men and women and different races and ethnicities earn more or less than others is due to the career and education choices made by the individuals. Sometimes those “choices” are less a “choice” and more of a necessity or are due to lack of access, but those are not things that can be fixed by numerous bills ostensibly aimed at closing a “wage gap” that’s allegedly due to discrimination.
Third, the Paycheck Fairness Act, like the Lilly Ledbetter Act, will do nothing to actually close the gap for precisely this reason. The bills don’t address the actual cause of the gap – people’s choices – so it can never close the gap. The Lilly Ledbetter Act has helped exactly no one since it was signed by former President Barack Obama in 2009.
The Paycheck Fairness Act, however, will end up hurting women and men by making it safer for companies to pay people the same regardless of talent, experience, hours worked, or other factors, meaning working hard won’t mean a thing. It also opens the doors for lawsuits against companies for alleged unequal pay.
While this might be good for trial lawyers, it’s not good for companies and it may not even be good for women. When Google conducted an internal study to determine if men and women were paid equally, it discovered that more men were being paid less than women for doing the same job. Given how many decades companies have been told to pay women more or hire women, it seems likely this bill will actually show that it is men who are being underpaid for the same work.
So, maybe that would actually be a good thing, but I don’t expect modern feminists to give up the talking point.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) consistently show that men outearn women, but as I said above, this is due to a variety of factors. An example I like to use is one pointing out how hours worked can change a person’s earnings.
A man and a woman are each paid $20 an hour for work. We know from BLS statistics that men work longer hours than women, so just using this one factor, we can see that being paid the same doesn’t mean someone earns the same. The man in this example ends up working 42 hours a week, for $840. The woman works 39 hours a week (again, these estimates are from BLS statistics), earning $780. They’re paid the same, but at the end of the week they have earned different amounts, see how this works?