On Father's Day, An Ode to Men

To the blue-collar men, who, to earn extra money to support themselves and their families, forgo a comfortable desk job in favor of jobs few would do: from cleaning our sewers so we can flush our toilets and eradicating rats from our basement so we don't get diseases to precariously trying to stop our roofs from leaking.

To the men who protect us. For example, the media is careful to call firefighters "firefighters" rather than "firemen" but I've now looked at dozens of photos of the firefighters attempting to stop the 55,000-acre Colorado fire. All are men. And in the 9/11 terrorist attack, 343 fire (ahem) fighters died. All were men.  

To the white-collar men who, to earn extra money to support themselves and their families, endure long, difficult technical training and/or uproot themselves to some God-forsaken place every few years.

To the professional men like physicians who, to earn more money for themselves and their families, choose a high-stress, highly demanding specialty such as surgery, where they often must be awakened in the middle of the night for an emergency surgery rather than choose one of the more pleasant specialties with regular hours like pediatrics or general practice.

To the men who serve and die in the military. Their modest extra combat pay doesn't compensate for the risk. Although the media is careful to always say the men and women serving in the military, 98% of the military deaths are men.

Yes, women earn 77 cents on the dollar, but there are reasons other than "We live in a sexist patriarchy that suppresses women."

To all the hard-working men that must endure the media's and colleges' endlessly portraying men as overpaid and inferior to women, today on Father's Day at least, and at least from this writer, I salute you.

A New Angle on the Pay Gap, Equal Pay, and Sexism: Should We Be Subsidizing People's Decisions to Have Children?

I consider myself a feminist, committed to equal opportunity for women and for men. I am not, however, a member of the subset of feminists who have dishonestly trumped-up statistics to further their cause.

One of the most unfair is the broad-brush statistic that women earn only 77 cents on the dollar compared with men. That unfair subset of feminists (and President Obama) asserts or implies that the pay gap is mainly caused by sexism. In fact, when one compares apples with apples, it's clear that pay gap is mostly or completely a function of women's choices.

For example, when women have children, on average, they choose to work fewer hours. Even if they claim to work full-time, women, on average, work fewer hours and, logically, parents are, on average, more fatigued and thus less effective than non-parent employees.

The claim of an unfair gender pay gap implies that parenthood should not cause a decline in pay. Really? When environmentalists believe (Also see this) that overpopulation may be the greatest threat to the environment, should employers cave to feminist pressure groups and be subsidizing childbearing--paying parents the same as non-parents? Should employers succumb to the pressure to provide on-site or subsidized child-care?  Or how about the too-often abused Family and Medical Leave Act, which allows, with minimum documentation, employees to take up to 12 weeks of leave every year to care for a family member and have their job waiting for them on return? The disruptive effect on workplaces is a major cost to employers. And now, those pressure groups want that leave to be paid leave! Indeed, paid family leave is already the law in California. and Washington, and 25% of large companies now give paid leave. Those additional costs to employers are passed on to you and I in higher prices. Is that fair, especially when, as I said, environmentalists assert that the #1 threat to the environment is overpopulation?

HERE is an article presenting an impressive assemblage of data debunking the claim that sexism is the main cause of any gender pay gap. Alas, unless you happen to read the Texoma Enterprise, you'd never see it.  An article of that quality is good enough for a national publication but because it doesn't conform to The Narrative--"Women (and minorities) are victims or heroes"--it's relegated to the Texoma Enterprise.

The "Paycheck Fairness Act" is Unfair

Finally, even the New York Times is publishing pieces that recognize that women are, for the same work, not, on average, underpaid.

The op-ed, Fair Pay Isn't Always Equal Pay, by Christina Hoff-Sommers, says,

The bill has received strong support from women’s rights groups, professional organizations and even President Obama, who has called it 'a common-sense bill.'

But the bill isn’t as commonsensical as it might seem. It overlooks mountains of research showing that discrimination plays little role in pay disparities between men and women, and it threatens to impose onerous requirements on employers to correct gaps over which they have little control.

Not surprisingly, the Obama administration and the liberal Congress ignore the facts. It's easier to kowtow to the feminist movement's Power Players: NOW, Catalyst, AAUW, etc. So the Democrats are proposing a Paycheck Fairness Act which would make it yet easier for women to file class-action(!), punitive-damages(!) lawsuits against employers they accuse of sex-based pay discrimination.

As a result, women will have an easier time of extorting big bucks from employers who are innocent but, in today's era of political correctness, will feel little choice but to pay off those women and their shark attorneys to make their expensive, time- and stress-consuming lawsuits go away.

The Myth of the Gender Pay Gap

Endlessly, the media parrots feminist organizations' grossly misleading assertion that women earn 77 to 80 cents on the dollar compared with men. Indeed, President Obama cites it all the time.

In many of my writings , for example, "Men Don't Have it Easy, Either" I've provided solid evidence of why that's so misleading: that for the truly same nature, quality, and quantity of work, women earn the same as men. When there is a pay gap, it's because women have chosen less rigorous, odious, or otherwise less demanding careers or jobs.

I've expressed frustration at the media's double standard of vetting: If you make a pro-male assertion, the media will nix it apriori or based on on a standard of rigor unrealistic in social science. But make a woman-as-victim assertion and it's published with little or no vetting. Rare exceptions are this op-ed in the New York Times and the book, Why Men Earn More.

The media's unwillingness to publish the lack of a pay gap is particularly frustrating in that the unemployment rate among men is now more than 25% higher than for women. And the gender ratio of 2010 degree recipients is 41% men, 59% women, the precise reverse of 40 years ago.

I've had five books and 600 articles well published but dare I write a pro-male piece it's almost never published. For example, in response to the irresponsibly written "The End of Men" that was the cover story in last month's The Atlantic, I wrote the far more solid "The Beginning of Men," and none of 20 publishers would publish it.

It finally took a woman to get published what I've been saying so long about the myth of a gender pay gap: One of the leading career bloggers, Penelope Trunk, just wrote this piece entitled, "A Salary Gap Between Men and Women? Oh please!"

I truly am tired of men getting treated unfairly. Perhaps it's time to take a cue from the immigration advocates who staged A Day Without Immigrants. Is it time for a national Day Without Men?

Why Women Don't Get Ahead in Science Careers

A blog post on Sciencecareers.org, a project of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS,) recently reported a study that found that "many women participate more actively at the beginning of their scientific career, with their work ambitions reduced after having children."

Why does the media relentlessly report claims of a glass ceiling yet rarely report research findings such as that?