Gender-Wage Gap = Gender-Hours Gap
Manhattan Institute fellow Kay Hymowitz in today's WSJ:
"Most people have heard that full-time working American women earn only
77 cents for every dollar earned by men. Yet these numbers don't take
into account the actual number of hours worked. And it turns out that
women work fewer hours than men.
According to the Labor Department, almost 55% of workers logging more than 35 hours a week are men. In 2007, 25% of men working full-time jobs had workweeks of 41 or more hours, compared with 14% of female full-time workers. In other words, the famous gender-wage gap is to a considerable degree a gender-hours gap."
MP: When comparing wages between two groups, there's always that inconvenient, pesky "ceteris paribus" condition to consider, e.g. hours worked. The gender activists always seem to want to go directly to "any disparity-proves-discrimination" dogma, without the inconvenience of having to control for all of the relevant variables that explain differences in wages.
7 Comments:
Belief in the gender wage gap is just about the perfect question to ask an interview candidate, to decide whom NOT to hire.
Anyone who truly believes that women are underpaid relative to men has never worked in a job where performance was measured on productivity, and also does not know why businesses even exist.
Why would you ever hire such a person?
Prof. Perry,
Your debunking of this old feminist lie implies that you think feminists will re-assess their views when faced with facts and logic.
Surely by now you know that this myth will never die, nor do its proponents care if it is factual or not. It brings in government freebies, so it still has legs. Fair or not.
Er, do women working at the White House work fewer hours than the men?
You can slice and dice data to enrage any group you'd like - take this short people!
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/Careers/02/02/cb.tall.people/
An anecdote:
I often have paintings and photographs framed at a shop on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The owner and I have taken to talking about politics and economics (neither of us are American, so we don't observe that taboo).
During my last trip he made some noises about women being underpaid. I set him straight, of course. He was stunned. The relief on his face was hilarious. Apparently, as an employer, the party line made no sense to him. And here was a woman in front of him challenging this conventional wizdumb.
I'm guessing none of this makes any sense to the woman who is getting flex time from her boss, nor to the boss giving her flex time in order to allow her to balance her family obligations (not to mention child birth), nor to the man and unwed and/or childless woman making as much or more than her male colleagues who are picking up the slack for the female employee tending to her children.
This old canard only appeals to the bitter and uninformed, the college student with no experience in the real world and the politically motivated - and Lord knows that there are plenty in those categories.
I'm glad that Mark Perry and others can be constantly relied upon to provide the facts in a user friendly form to make it easier to dispel these myths for the people who are not willing to cling to self-serving fantasy at all cost.
moneyjihad says: "Er, do women working at the White House work fewer hours than the men?"...
LMAO!
Excellent call...
Then one could possibly make the argument that they are merely campaign volunteers...:-)
They've told themselves that men and women are EXACTLY THE SAME for so long that they actually believe it. I'm sure the next argument would be that women working fewer hours is some sort of sexism at work.
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