No doubt, most of you will begin reading this article expecting to be confirmed in your beliefs on the gender pay gap or possibly angered by some remarkable, sexist arrogance. I trust that you’ll take a moment to open yourself to what may be a personally new perspective on the gender pay gap. Most of you have probably already heard about the real gender pay gap but may have dismissed it. I’ll attempt to explain what it is and where it comes from in order to offer a better understanding.
The gap that could be relevant to discrimination is not the $0.22 per dollar difference as cited by Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and many others. This statistic is known as the “raw wage gap” that only compares the average yearly income of all men to all women without considering things like age, education, experience, marital status, if the worker has children, race, region, occupation, industry, percent female/male, union interference, full vs. part time or firm size. In 2009, the Department of Labor hired CONSAD Research Corporation to study the wage gap. It was found that the wage gap, when considering said variables, is between $0.048 and $0.071 per dollar and may be caused by “socially acceptable” differences as opposed to “overt discrimination against women.” To read this report, titled “An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women,” google “Gender Gap DoL Report.” Skip to Section 4 for a summary. Despite having the CONSAD report on record, the Department of Labor under the Obama Administration still insists that the wage gap is $0.22 per dollar and blames it mostly on discrimination, citing questionable reports that do not consider all variables affecting the pay of an individual. I consider this practice to be misleading and divisive.
If you still are not convinced, another report published in October 2012 by the American Association of University Women titled “Graduating to a Pay Gap: The Earnings of Women and Men One Year after College Graduation” corroborates the CONSAD conclusion with a pay gap of $0.066 per dollar in favor of men. This report even addresses the problems of pay secrecy and debt, but ultimately highlights cultural issues, which lead to individual choices based on gender, which cause some pay disparity. For example, female mechanics are rare just as male primary educators are rare. This is caused in part by the personal career choices of people, individuals conforming to gender roles and other complex social variables. However, this report implies that strengthening laws that have already existed for decades can eliminate the pay gap. Of this I am extremely skeptical.
The problem is that the remaining gap that still exists even after compensating for as many variables as can be reasonably measured is unexplained. There are many theories, such as overt discrimination, lack of skill in wage negotiations, income secrecy distorting worker value, et cetera, but until this gap can be identified, quantified and verified, no intellectually responsible person can assert one mechanism over the other. Furthermore, it could be caused by a complex combination of governmental policies and personal choices.
Addressing the change from the 22 percent difference in the raw average of annual pay between men and women to the 4.8–7.1 percent difference in annual wages between men and women, it is important to realize that this large jump was caused simply by examining the socially acceptable variables that contribute to annual earnings. This means that we know now that 69–79 percent of the raw wage gap is due to reasonable conditions that determine an employee’s value in the workplace. In other words, it’s up to women to make career choices that will remedy this measured difference, thus increasing female average annual pay by 20.6–23.6 percent. The remaining 4.8–7.1 percent difference in annual wages that has not been irrefutably verified for causation, is still a mystery. It could be caused by any number of combinations of things. While discrimination surely plays some part in this, neither the extent nor the methods have been measured. I urge you all to remain objective. Do not demand legislation to fix problems we cannot verify. Such efforts would only waste time and further divide our country. Search for truth; don’t act on impulse.