Studies: Childless Women Earn More Than Childless Men. Is the "Pay Gap" Caused By Sexism?

A study that found that in Ireland, Australia, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, childless women earn more than men. That supports a study that found that, contrary to that, study, that's also true in the U.S.

So, today, the Huffington Post convened a panel to discuss the implications. For truly the same work are women underpaid relative to men? Is the endlessly cited statistic that, overall, women earn less than men misleading, comparing apples with anchovies?

I was honored to be part of that discussion. HERE is the video.

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.

At All Ages, the Pay Gap Favors Women

The Wall Street Journal reported a study that found that in 148 of 150 cities, women 22 to 30 earned 8% more than men.

Not surprisingly, the mainstream (liberal) media e.g., Time, Salon, etc then immediately reminded us that women overall still earn 80 cents on the dollar. The cover story of this month's More magazine, yells, "Pay us what we're worth damn it...so women no longer bring in 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man."

President Obama continues to cite that statistic as evidence that more needs to be done to increase women's pay relative to men's.

Of course, women earn 80 cents on the dollar but that doesn't mean sexism is a cause, let alone the major cause. There are far more likely causes. Except for the final bullet, I've documented each of these in previous writings:

• Even among people who work "full-time," the average woman works seven hours a week less than men.
  
• Women are less likely to choose jobs that require in-demand, difficult-to-acquire, and thus highly-paid skills such as physics and software engineering.
• Women are less likely to do loathsome and/or dangerous jobs that thus pay more such as sewer repair, police work, and rodent control.
• Women are less likely to move their families to far-flung places to get the promotions needed to rise to top levels. For example, Bentonville, Arkansas is where Wal-Mart is headquartered.
  
• Women, on average, are more interested in having kids and in being highly involved parents, even though the evidence does not support quantity of time, net, benefiting the child. In fact, helicopter parenting makes it more likely that a child will feel entitled and who is deprived of sufficient opportunities to gain self efficacy.
  

And all that time and energy the parent spends on the child makes a less valuable employee: years out of the workforce means you don't keep up with needed skills, you lose valuable contacts, etc. And even when parents are back to work, moms tend to give less attention to their jobs than childless women. Especially when environmentalists tell us that overpopulation is the greatest environmental threat, employers should not be subsidizing people who choose to have children by being forced to pay mothers equal pay for non-equal work.

• This is anecdotal, based merely on the reportage of my friends, colleagues, and the 3,000+ career coaching clients I've had over the last 25 years, but I believe what I say in this paragraph in every bone in my body. There, of course, are many exceptions but in general, I've found that, on average, women at work, work less hard and are less productive. They are more likely to have "issues," on which they stew unproductively or require other workers to help them "process their feelings." I've more often heard a woman than a man say, "I was so upset I couldn't get my work done." Recent popular books have documented what I've heard from clients, colleagues and friends, that women are more likely than men to sabotage fellow workers of whom they're jealous. On average, women simply work less hard during the work day--more likely to chat, less likely to work drivingly hard. I am well aware that such statements will result in people calling me a sexist even though it's not true--I absolutely do try to judge people on their merits, not their gender. But one of the main benefits I derive from writing a blog is that unlike when I write for the mainstream media, I can say here what I truly believe. And I deeply believe every word of what I've just said.

The fact that women 22-30 (thus likely not to yet have children) are earning 8% more than men is, in my view, yet one more example of men being treated unfairly relative to their merit.

To find more of my writings in which I document the unfair treatment of men relative to their merit, just click on the phrase "men's issues" in this blog's label cloud, located to the right.

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?

The Supposed Gender Pay Gap

Today's Time hauled out the old misleading statistic that women earn less than men, this time saying that even when "a number of factors" are considered, women still only earn 91% on the dollar compared with men.

Could it be that the 9% differential are the result of the many factors not considered, for example, these from the book, Why Men Earn More:

• Women who work "full time" work fewer hours than do men.
• When women make the choice to have children are more likely to spend it with their kids than, for example, flying across the country for a conference, let alone a promotion. Indeed, salary studies of the unmarried find that women, for the same work, earn more than men.
• Even within the same job title, the person with more technical skills is more likely to be given a higher salary, since technical skills are more rarely held. Men are more likely to develop technical expertise.
  

Why do major publications like Time publish such shoddily supported articles when they favor women when stronger articles documenting unfairness to men are rejected without comment?

Women Earn 78 Cents on the Dollar... NOT!

I've written about this frequently, but here's a recent summary of the research from nationally syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker. She wrote it in response to President Obama's announcement of a White House Council on Women and Girls:

There isn't space here to fully critique each statistic mentioned by the president, but here's just one: Women still earn 78 cents for every dollar earned by men.

As has been often explained, apparently to deaf ears, this figure is derived by comparing the average median wage of all full-time working men and women without considering multiple variables, including the choices women and men make. A more accurate picture comes from a 2007 report prepared for the U.S. Department of Labor by the CONSAD Research Corp.

Although women do not lead as many Fortune 500 companies (only 3 percent, according to Obama), they account for 51 percent of all workers in the high-paying management, professional and related occupations, according to the study. Women outnumber men, for example, as financial managers, human resource managers, education administrators, medical and health services managers, and accountants and auditors.

Otherwise, wage differences can be explained by "observable differences in the attributes of men and women," including, among many, the fact that a greater percentage of women than men take leave for childbirth and child care, which tends to lead to lower wages. Also, women may place more value on "family-friendly" workplace policies and prefer non-wage compensation, such as health insurance or flexibility.

The statistical analysis, which included these and other variables, produced an adjusted gender wage gap between 4.8 percent and 7.1 percent. The gap shrinks to almost nothing when men and women of equal backgrounds and tenure are compared, according to another study of young, childless men and women.

While no one would argue that women shouldn't be compensated as well as men for the same work, it isn't quite accurate to suggest a widespread problem of wage discrimination.

Or, as the Labor Department labor study warns against, to justify policy-level correctives.

Whatever imbalances remain should be self-correcting as women and men achieve educational parity, but that's if boys get some help. Indeed, men and women reached educational parity with college graduation rates in 1982. Today, women receive 58 percent of bachelor's degrees and represent half of graduates in medical and law school.

Boys, meanwhile, are the ones dropping out of school or being expelled. They're the ones failing, abusing drugs and committing suicide. What kind of men do we expect them to become, assuming they survive?

Cathy Young, in a recent article in Reason, added this: "Numerous studies show that when differences in training, work hours, and continuity of employment are taken into account, the pay gap all but disappears. Most economists, including liberal feminists such as Harvard's Claudia Goldin, agree that while sex discrimination exists, male-female disparities in earnings and achievement are due primarily to personal choices and priorities. Women are far more likely than men to avoid jobs with 60-hour workweeks and to scale down their careers while raising children. They are also more likely to choose less lucrative but more fulfilling jobs."

I do not understand why liberals are so eager to be unfair to men.

Obama's New Council On Women and Girls: A Man's Perspective

Yesterday, President Obama announced a new Council on Women and Girls. Its mandate is to address these areas: violence against women, women’s health, economic security for women, and balance between work and family. Each of those will exacerbate the already unfair treatment of men:

Women 's health. When women have a deficit, for example, they're underrepresented in engineering, massive redress programs are initiated but when men have the deficit, even the ultimate deficit--they die 5.3 years younger and live their last decade in worse physical and mental health--all we see is yet more focus on women's health. Countless nonprofits and government agencies address women's health, few address men's.

Violence against women. What about violence against men? The research clearly indicates that 25% to 45% of severe domestic violence is initiated by women. Yet Obama ignores that.

Economic security. In announcing the Council, Obama said, "Women still earn just 78 cents for every dollar men make." Few statistics are more misleading: As is well documented, for the same work and same level of expertise, women earn at least as much as men. But the Council, using such profoundly misleading statistics, will likely demand legislation hurting men further--raising women's pay but not men's. And in a tight economy, tight budgets will often mean that if women's pay must be raised, men's will be decreased.

Balance between work and family. The Council on Women and Girls will, for example, likely urge employers to provide paid family leave, which more women than men will use, thereby saddling men with the work those women leave behind.

If President Obama were to be fair, he would institute a Council on Men and Boys. Its mandates would include:

• Reducing the life-expectancy gap between men and women.
• Helping to ensure that men and women receive equal pay for truly equal work.
• Reducing domestic violence against men and women.
• Ensuring fairness to men and women in divorce and custody cases.
• Ensuring fairness to men and women in college admissions, hiring and promotion. (For example, among this year's college graduates, almost 60% will be women, only 40% men. Society didn't tolerate it when, decades ago, the situation was the reverse and society shouldn't tolerate it now.)
• Ensuring that the curriculum and the media doesn't unfairly demonize boys and men. Today, textbooks focus on women's accomplishments and men's evils. Boys are falling further and further behind girls in student achievement. Movies and television programs disproportionately portray women as smart and efficacious, men as boors, idiots, dishonest, and/or violent. Men have contributed mightily to society: from the transformative (inventing everything from refrigeration to penicillin to Google) to the mundane (from building our homes to policing our streets to digging our graves.)

Obama claims to be a president for all Americans. He needs to prove it.

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?