No Wage Gap: Feminists Want Equal Pay for Unequal Work
Of course, this wage gap has been repeatedly debunked—at least among those who value fact above narrative. The fact is that a shallow comparison of median income of men to that of women shows that the latter make around 23 percent less. Feminist storytellers then loosely paraphrase that as an assertion that women only make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes for doing the same work. Since everyone knows that fairness generally requires that equal work earn equal pay, this discrepancy is touted as proof of deeply rooted sexism in the American economy.
Nevertheless, a shallow comparison doesn’t reveal much when one’s income is rather heavily influenced by factors such as the hours one works and the job one has trained for—factors that are mostly a matter of personal volition in modern society. When it comes to education, for example, women tend to choose less lucrative courses of study. They dominate fields that specialize in quasi-familial types of personal care (e.g., early childhood education, social work, counseling, etc.) as well as those that aspire to elevate artistic creativity into what are usually financially uncertain professions (e.g. studio arts, visual and performing arts, etc.) At the same time, men dominate more lucrative engineering fields that tend to be abstracted away from these kinds of social engagement.
Read the article “No Wage Gap: Feminists Want Equal Pay for Unequal Work” on thefederalist.com.
