Carrie Lukas in the WSJ: "There Is No Male-Female Wage Gap":
Feminist hand-wringing about the wage gap relies on the assumption that the differences in average earnings stem from discrimination. Thus the mantra that women make only 77% of what men earn for equal work. But even a cursory review of the data proves this assumption false.
posted by Helen at 5:34 AM
18 Comments:
This isn't news.
J. Bowen,
Maybe not, but it needs to be heard again and again to start to enter the mainstream of American culture.
many of my clients are professional women at the height fo thier careers and none of them see a wage difference in their field.
most are accountants, human resource executives and so on and make the same as their male counter-parts.
interestingly enough one accountant says she likes where she works because she works only with other "strong" women and doesn`t have to deal with men!
Progressivism assumes discrimination is every difference. Blacks earn less, so they see it as prima facia evidence of discrimination rather than look at the data concerning drop out rates and the lack of fathers in the black community. This is their MO, forcing their square paranoia into round data.
Trey
I agree with Dr. Helen's point. These facts need to be hammered home over and over and over again to counteract the false victim meme that the feminist movement has created. The same thing needs to be done with domestic violence and divorce as well, in my opinion.
They do indeed.
For what it's worth, the data shows there is a wage gap. It is a gap of 7%, in favor of women. Those who pooh-pooh that as negligible should ponder how many times most people get a 7% raise, and how big a deal that would be to them.
I've read that in NYC and Austin, TX, women make as much as 18% more than men.
To J. Bowen:
Helen's right. It has to be continually mentioned. Unfortunately, there are often real social costs in mentioning it.
I took a course in Industrial and Organizational Psychology a couple years ago and, of course, the proudly feminist female professor mentioned that women, on the whole, make less money than men. She never mentioned this particular fact, which I knew but never mentioned. This was entirely in keeping with the way that she taught the rest of the course and, in fact, the way the whole school was run. She was amazingly good at BS'ing, almost always by carefully selecting what was mentioned and what wasn't.
A recent Time magazine had Hillery on the cover with the title, "Breaking glass ceilings". I could not imagine what she was talking about.
Female Senator? Been done.
Female Sec State? Been Done x2
Female sec State starting a war? Been done x2.
Women earn less than men because there are few women in the best-paying fields, including filmmaking, haute couture, haute cuisine, physics, chemistry, math, chess, engineering, economics and on and on.
In view of this, something would be amiss if women were found to earn the same as men.
Indeed, considering overtime hours and dedication to career, women are overpaid. When it comes to lifetime benefits in our socialist society, women make out like bandits: they receive social security benefits for a longer period of time, they enjoy a bump-up in benefits based on their usually higher-earning husband's benefits (whether he's alive or dead), and many get full benefits whether they've ever earned a dollar in their lives or not. They also take more than their share of group medical benefits, considering the subsidy for breeding and hypochondria.
They also gain more from Medicare and much more from Medicaid (which mostly benefits women and children). In fact, the situation is so skewed in favor of women that a young man should emigrate at age 22, preferably to a freer and fairer country like Estonia or New Zealand.
Somebody should do a fair analysis of the lifetime t!t-sucking advantage accorded to women in our socialist society.
Right jimbino,
But there's a lot more to it than that. The amount of money that is transferred from men to women is astounding, and it is never looked at by society.
To start with, men pay 7 billion dollars in alimony to women every year. That's only alimony ordered as such by courts, that was really paid and that was deducted as such from the payer's income tax return. Annual child support payments absolutely dwarf that figure, and a percentage of them are really "mommy support". Divorce settlements are another mechanism for transferring money that men earned with work to women (since women statistically "marry up").
Those are just a few of the formal mechanisms for transferring money from men to women, though. Since women "marry up" statistically, the transfer of money in a family is going to statistically be from the man to the woman. Typically, today, the man works a more stressful, higher paying job in a more stressful area, whereas the woman works at a job with less stress that she enjoys more. She also works far less than the man statistically. But she has the same lifestyle as him, so money is flowing from him to her. Men also die at a younger age than women, and women tend to also marry up age-wise to slightly older, or older, men, so they are likely to inherit all of his money - sometimes at a relatively young age.
There are also tremendous informal flows of money. If a single woman is not (too) fat and has normal looks, she can get all of her dining out, entertainment etc. paid for. That's how "dating" works. Lots of college girls are proud of never paying for drinks in a bar. Lots of them even get vacations paid for.
Taxes are another method for redistributing money. Men pay the majority of taxes, but more of the tax money ultimately goes to women. Also, lots of hidden breaks for women are in the tax code. There is an "innocent spouse" act - if the men brings in lots of money that he doesn't declare as income - and the women lives off it - and the man is later caught, the woman can get out of her responsibility to pay, even though she signed a joint tax declaration. And "woman" here is the right noun, because women tend to "marry up", and they are far more likely to be in that position. As another example, work (more likely men) is penalized by income taxes, gifts (more likely women) are not in many situations. Men make huge gifts to women in marriage, for example.
Women get far more money in life than what they work for. Far more. And it is coming from men. No one really wants to examine that in society.
This is from 2004:
http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/04statab/fedgov.pdf
Look at Document 477, "Alimony Paid" line.
Around 7 1/2 billion. Every year.
To put that in perspective, that's the ENTIRE gross domestic product of the Bahamas or Malta flowing to women in America. Every year, and that's just alimony, which is orders of magnitude below the rest of the payments to women.
JG, you really opened my eyes to the whole wealth transfer aspect of this. While we often bang heads, I appreciate the info you are sharing and find it illuminating and helpful.
So thanks.
Trey
my point has always been that we know the nature of (some) women in regard to money and other assets, and it`s easy to test whether a specific woman is a bandit.
go to dinner with her.
if she goes to the bathroom when the cheque comes...leave her there.
i dated a beautiful russian woman who seemed to be a good partner at the outset. funny, sensitive, intelligent, and beautiful. we went for lunch at a nice place by the lake and when the cheque came i put my half on the table and got up and walked to the door.
boy was she pissed when we got in the car.
in the real world where everyone is employed these bandit games are tragic, yet women give themselves permission all over the map to be thieves...and a certain type of man gives in to the game for the expectation of sex and then gets angry because they made a poor decision.
not all women are like this, yet some insist that, because they can`t make a girl do what they want, that all women must somehow be evil.
for every woman stealing, there is a complicit man....otherwise the money wouldn`t change hands.
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Related Silliness - have at it, men.
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