President Obama once released an ad stating:
President Obama knows that women being paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men isn’t just unfair, it hurts families. So the first law he signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to help ensure that women are paid the same as men for doing the exact same work.
He’s not alone in making this sort of assertion; countless sources have made similar claims of pay discrimination leading to women earning less. Jon Stewart mentions this factoid constantly. John Oliver too.
All of them are wrong. There is no evidence of widespread pay discrimination against women.
According to a report from Obama’s own administration, “On average in 2012, women made about 81 percent of the median earnings of male full-time wage and salary workers ($854).” So that certainly proves that Obama was wrong when he used the “77 cents” figure, many, many times. But does it prove gender-based discrimination?
Far from it. If one assumes that men and women should earn identical amounts, there’s an implicit assumption that men and women do identical work. In reality, different types of work are expected to deliver different salaries or wages. Since women and men aren’t identical, no one would reasonable expect their wages and salaries to be identical.
For example, the average man is bigger, taller, and physically stronger than the average woman. There are many jobs where physical strength and size matter. One would logically expect the average man to be better at those jobs than the average woman. There’s a reason why Lebron James earns a lot more than any female athlete: he’s a better athlete. It has nothing to do with gender discrimination.
Then there’s the question of mental differences between the average man and average woman. This is thorny question because in the past, much misogynist garbage has been advanced as fact on this issue. But people being wrong about what the mental differences are between typical men and women does not prove that there aren’t any. For example, it may be the case that men are more willing to take physical risks than women. Risky jobs such as deep-sea fishing or oil rig work are done overwhelmingly by men. These jobs pay more than jobs requiring the same education but less risk, so in that education bracket men may earn more than women. Once again it has nothing to do with gender discrimination.
It’s often discussed why there are so few women in tech fields like computer programming and engineering, which tend to have high salaries. Merely mentioning the possibility that this is because of different mental skill sets between genders can be hazardous to one’s career, as Larry Summers found out. But just because some parties want to silence any debate on the topic, doesn’t mean that there aren’t any differences worth considering. Female students outnumber males at most top colleges and universities, but females are much less likely to select tech fields. It can scarcely be because they lack the opportunity, when all fields are open to all students.
There’s another difference between women and men worth noting. Only women can get pregnant, and women on average take far more time off from work for childcare. Since more experience leads to higher pay, this is another factor that causes average men to be paid more than average women.
All told, once all the facts about differences between genders are taken into account, the supposed pay gap shrinks to a very small number, or possibly zero. And no one seems to understand this better than President Obama … sometimes. Five years after promising that the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act would “help ensure that women are paid the same”, he was advancing new legislation that would do exactly what he previously claimed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act would do. (He did not explain why the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act had failed.) Someone dug into the data on salaries in the White House and, surprise, surprise, Obama pays his female employees less than male ones, on average. White House Press Secretary was left to stumble through an explanation for why a pay gap was okay for the White House. If we just applied the same logic to the nation as a whole, we’d realize that the “pay gap” is not evidence of gender discrimination at all.