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.