EKIP– Expert Club for Economics and Politics A Different Opinion
Thomas Sowell
The political slogan “War on Women” is actually a war on common sense. The statements of many politicians that women’s incomes are only 77% of those of men and that the reason for this is discrimination are nothing more than statistical fraud.
Women would definitely be discriminated against if they did the same job as men, for the same number of hours, with the same skills, experience, and everything else. However, over the past few decades, study after study has shown that these metrics are not the same.
Constantly repeating the “77 percent statistic” doesn’t make them equal. It simply exploits the ignorance of most people – something Barack Obama has done repeatedly.
What would the results be if we compared women and men who have similar work characteristics?
It is difficult to make such a comparison because data is hard to find for a wide range of professions and for other differences between men and women in the labor market.
Even in cases where data are available, very careful judgment is needed to select samples of both sexes that are truly comparable.
For example, women are mothers and men are fathers. But does the fact that both sexes are parents really make them comparable in the labor market? In fact, the biggest income gap is between fathers and mothers. When you think about it, there's nothing unexpected about that.
Is it any wonder that mothers don't get paid the same as women who don't have children? If you think children don't take up mothers' time, you've never had any.
Is it any wonder that men with children earn more than men without children—the exact opposite of the relationship for women? Is it any surprise that a man with more mouths to feed has to work longer hours? Or take on more difficult or dangerous jobs to earn more money?
More than 90% of people who die at work are men. There is no point in pretending that there are no differences between the work men and women do, or that this does not affect their income.
When I was analyzing gender data for my book, Economic Facts and Myths, I was amazed to find that young male doctors earn significantly more than young female doctors. But my astonishment vanished when I realized that male doctors work an average of 500 more hours per year than women.
Even when women and men work the same job – whether they are doctors, lawyers, economists or others – salaries are not determined by the name of the job, but by the actual work done.
Women lawyers who are pregnant or have young children have a strong incentive to choose a 9-to-5 government job over a 60-hour week at a fast-paced law firm. But it makes no sense to compare women and men lawyers as groups without looking deeper than their job descriptions.
Unless, of course, your goal is not to show the truth, but to use political speech to deceive the naive.
Even when comparing women and men with the “same” education, measured in high school or college degrees, women typically specialize in different fields with significantly different earning potential.
Although comparing men and women with similar characteristics is not easy, when people who have similar characteristics are studied, gender differences decrease dramatically and even almost disappear. In some fields, women earn more than men with the same characteristics.
If the statistics were true, employers would pay every man they hired 30% more than they "should" pay, assuming every woman could do his job just as well. Would they be so foolish with their own money? If you think employers don't care if they pay 30% more, ask your boss for a 30% raise!
Translation: Arkady Sharkov
Editors: Daniel Vassilev and Adrian Nikolov
You can read the original article here.
