I’m not going to come in on Taxman’s side of this, but I do remember reading about a flawed study regarding equal pay by gender. It was some years ago, unfortunately, as I was thumbing through a selection in Waldenbooks, so I can’t provide a title.
The book noted that the original study was done in about 1973 by the New York Times. The study concluded, as have many studies after, that women made significantly less, on average, than men. But wait, the book added; ten years later they revisited the study and found they’d done it wrong.
According to my memory of this book, the original Times study involved calling a thousand men and a thousand women, asking them how much they made per year, and hanging up. Not exactly the pinnacle of science: in the 1980s study they admitted they hadn’t exactly asked “by the way, you have a job? No? Is this because you don’t want one, or because you can’t find one? Mmm. And what’s your title? Really? Mmm, interesting, how many hours do you work? How long have you been there? What did you start at? Oh, really! And have you had any raises since then, and how often, and how big were they? And can you provide us with a tax return so we can see you’re not lying about your salary?–we know men sometimes feel the need to inflate their achievements where money is concerned.”
This book claimed that the 1980s study showed that, barring positions of ownership and executive roles, women sometimes made the same as men, sometimes made less, and sometimes made more.
Needless to say, because the first study feels right to many people, it gets quoted frequently. More recent, more accurate studies are harder to come by, and anecdotes abound. Hardly anyone points out that the study was re-done due to terrible scientific methods and bad data-gathering.
Myself, I suspect the pay inequality is probably true, but I don’t know how you’d go about proving it, short of following people around every day to make sure their work is truly equal. For fear I misrepresent Taxman’s position, I agree that bad studies have been done which don’t prove much. So yes, probably true, but woolly-thinking studies aren’t helping.
FISH