Obama Panders to Women by Pushing ‘Wage Gap’ Myth in Acceptance Speech
"And now is the time to keep the promise of equal pay for an equal day's work, because I want my daughters to have exactly the same opportunities as your sons."
In his acceptance speech last night Barack Obama pandered to women by pushing the "wage gap" myth. As we've discussed many times, men earn more than women on average for many legitimate reasons. These include:
1) Men work longer hours at more demanding and hazardous jobs
2) Men are more likely to travel, relocate or have long commutes for their jobs
3) Men are more likely to have more years and more consecutive years of experience, because women are more likely to work part time or take years off of work to care for their children.
Given these factors, it would be very hard for men to not earn considerably more than women. When men and women of matched qualifications are working in matched jobs, women earn as much as men do.
Obama has made these claims this many, many times. For example, in this interview he claims that women are paid only 78% as much as men are for the same job. He also discusses his new economic plan, which is oriented towards women. (Starts at 5:30, ends at 6:30)
To be fair, Republican party presidential candidate John McCain to date hasn't been any better. For one example, in this interview, McCain decries the mythical gap and pledges to eradicate it, saying, "We haven't done enough. We have not done enough. And I'm committed to making sure that there's equal pay for equal work. That there is equal opportunity in every aspect of our society. And that is my record and you can count on it."
The best recent work on the alleged wage gap was done by Warren Farrell in his book Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap And What Women Can Do About It. In discussing a New York Times article on the subject, he wrote:
The New York Times front page headline recently tells us that "For Young Earners in Big City, Gap Shifts in Women's Favor." The big surprise? New York City women between 21 and 30 working full-time made 117% of men's wages. Everyone is wondering why. Here's why, for starters...
When I did the research for Why Men Earn More in 2005, I discovered that nationwide never-married women who had never had children earned 117% of the wages of never married men who had never had children. Manhattan women in their twenties are less likely to have married or had children than women in their twenties who live in suburban and rural areas. The overall pay gap with men earning more is not about discrimination; it is mostly about the division of labor once children arrive.
The usual men-earn-more pay gap is also about trade-offs. The road to high pay is a toll road. On average, men are more willing to pay the tolls of the more hazardous jobs (accounting for 94% of workplace deaths), to work on commissions, relocate overseas, travel overnight and travel weekends (approximately 90% of the most frequent flyers are men), work late nights and night shifts, work weekends, intensify their work commitment during child-raising years, work in engineering, computer sciences, technology and the hard sciences where the supply doesn't match the demand, and do all of the twenty-five most important trade-offs that on average lead to men earning more.
The good news is that any woman can learn to out earn men should she be willing to make more of the twenty-five trade-offs than the average man makes.
To read more of Warren's analysis of the wage gap, see Warren Farrell on the ’Wage Gap’.
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