Why the Gender Wage Gap is Really a Myth

The Wage Gap
Whether or not the wage gap exists depends entirely upon who one asks. If one is asking Christina Hoff Sommers, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and writer for Time, she will say, no, it does not exist: “The bottom line: the 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time.” The enduring myth that “women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns—for doing the same work” is based on the average earnings statistic—not on an actual analysis of a side by side comparison of pay for men and women doing the same work (Sommers). But if you ask Nikki Graf, Anna Brown and Eileen Patten, writing for Pew Research, you will research a much different answer. They argue that the pay gap is closing but that women are still behind by as much as 15 cents on the dollar. However, if one pays attention to the data that Graf et al. are using, one can see that Hoff Sommers has a point. These studies are not of side by side comparisons of wages for men and women doing the same work. They are rather statistics of median earnings—and all they really show is that men make more money than women: they do not actually show how that is happening, i.e., whether men are working more hours, working different jobs, or receiving higher pay because they have higher positions in companies. Both sides of the argument are correct, nonetheless: there is a wage gap—or rather an earnings gap. The only difference is in how the sides interpret the statistics.
If one is going to accept the argument of Hoff Sommers, there really is not anything that needs to be done about it. If women want to make more than their male colleagues all they have to do is put in the kind of hours at the kind of level where they will earn a higher salary. It is not a question of inequality in terms of lousy, law-breaking HR departments all over the country arbitrarily deciding that every female employee will receive 15 cents less on the dollar than her male colleague. That would be quite illegal and any company caught doing that would surely face a bevy of lawsuits. That is why the argument of Graf et al. as well as of Heather Wilde at Inc. citing a study by the US Department of Labor falls flat. If this wage gap were really a deliberate act on the part of the Human Resources departments of every company across the board in the US, every company would be sued out of business for discrimination. There are myriad labor laws that protect against exactly this sort of thing. What Graf et al. and Wilde are doing is simply exactly what Hoff Sommers says they are doing: they are taking statistics of median earnings of men and women and interpreting those statistics through a lens of gender inequality without really thinking about what the stats actually show. These studies are not side by side comparisons of what men and women make for the same work. They are simply representations of average income for men compared to women. They say nothing about the type of jobs the two are doing, the industries, the hours, the work, etc. Graf et al. and Wilde are simply assuming that the difference in earnings must be another indication of gender inequality in the system.
It really is no such thing, though. Those who are essentially accusing HR departments of doing something illegal by deliberately paying women less than men for the same work should perhaps try getting in touch with the head of an HR department sometime to put the question to them directly. The HR manager will surely laugh because not only could he or she be fired for doing so but he or she could also be held criminally liable for discriminating against women in that way. It is just not a practice that they do—and so it is just a gender boogeyman that media types like Gaff et al. and Wilde and many others like to use for headline fodder and clickbait: it gets people’s attention and feeds on inequality bias. There is a built-in audience for such articles, so it should be no surprise that the myth of why the gender wage gap exists continues to spread.
The reality is that if women want to make as much money as men do the only way to do it is to do as much work. That may sound cold and insensitive but the simple fact of the matter is that men and women make different education and career choices. Hoff Sommers points out that wage activists say this is because women are pressured into making life decisions that go against that career earnings potential. The argument that Hoff Sommers makes in response is that women are self-determining and to say that they are socially coerced into sacrificing their career earnings potential to have children or to step aside for men is actually an extremely sexist thing to say. Women have children because they want them. They don’t go after that higher paying job with the more intense hours and responsibilities because they choose not to—they do not want it. They pick different education pathways in school because those are the pathways that appeal to them (Sommers).
In conclusion, the debate is all about how men make more than women. The wage activists say it is because of illegal discrimination against women by virtually every HR department in the country (they don’t say this explicitly but implicitly this can be the only way such a conspiracy against women could actually happen). The realists point out that the wage gap is really just an earnings gap—men make more than women because they have different jobs with different demands and typically longer hours. It is not a conspiracy against women—it is simply a reflection of the different choices and pathways that men and women take in their education, careers and lives.
Works Cited
Graf, Nikki and Anna Brown, Eileen Patton. “The narrowing, but persistent, gender gap in pay.” Pew Research Center, 2019. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/03/22/gender-pay-gap-facts/
Sommers, Christina Hoff. “6 Feminist Myths That Will Not Die.” Time, 2016. https://time.com/3222543/wage-pay-gap-myth-feminism/
Wilde, Heather. “Does the Wage Gap Exist? I Was Paid 60 Percent Less Than Men in the Same Role.” Inc., 2019. https://www.inc.com/heather-wilde/does-wage-gap-exist-i-was-paid-60-percent-less-than-men-in-same-role.html