BlackFlag10
College Conservative
- Jun 1, 2012
- 121
- 41
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The gender wage gap is an argument and a cause that comes up often in political discussions and platforms. Just like many other rallying cries in politics though, it is entirely a myth, driven by bad statistical theory, a flawed methodology, and, in the Presidents case, a desire for an undeniable political win amid a sea of otherwise disappointing losses.
In Tuesday nights State of the Union address, President Bararck Obama claimed, Today, women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, its an embarrassment. A woman deserves equal pay for equal work.
I agree with him; a man and a woman doing the same work absolutely deserve to make the same amount of money, but using that 77 cents number to argue that they dont is wrong and irresponsible.
You see, the government agencies or private institutions tasked with discovering and quantifying the gender wage gap take an extremely lazy approach to it. Instead of the normal academic approach, which would involve finding men and women working the same exact job, for the same hours, with the same education and experience, they simply either find the median or mean of salaries for all men and women (or representative samples) working full-time and compare them.
The latter calculation, the flawed one, does show that women, on average, earn less than men. However, the President and others want you to believe that this is due to discriminatory workplace policy when it is not. It is simply because of the different career decisions that men and women make.
When we attempt to calculate the gender wage gap by simply viewing all men versus all women in the workforce, we neglect to account for explanatory variables that severely affect the outcome. The variable that most significantly affects the outcome is the difference in career choices between men and women.
For full post see No, There Is Not A 23 Cent Gender Wage Gap -
In Tuesday nights State of the Union address, President Bararck Obama claimed, Today, women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, its an embarrassment. A woman deserves equal pay for equal work.
I agree with him; a man and a woman doing the same work absolutely deserve to make the same amount of money, but using that 77 cents number to argue that they dont is wrong and irresponsible.
You see, the government agencies or private institutions tasked with discovering and quantifying the gender wage gap take an extremely lazy approach to it. Instead of the normal academic approach, which would involve finding men and women working the same exact job, for the same hours, with the same education and experience, they simply either find the median or mean of salaries for all men and women (or representative samples) working full-time and compare them.
The latter calculation, the flawed one, does show that women, on average, earn less than men. However, the President and others want you to believe that this is due to discriminatory workplace policy when it is not. It is simply because of the different career decisions that men and women make.
When we attempt to calculate the gender wage gap by simply viewing all men versus all women in the workforce, we neglect to account for explanatory variables that severely affect the outcome. The variable that most significantly affects the outcome is the difference in career choices between men and women.
For full post see No, There Is Not A 23 Cent Gender Wage Gap -
