This is amazing. The track record of mainstream feminists’ discussion of the wage “gap” is often not very good, but I’m genuinely dumbfounded by a pair of articles just published by Salon and the New York Times.

Salon runs an article entitled, Harvard economist: Gender is at the root of the pay gap — not jobs. “Harvard economists” don’t usually make the kind of easily-rebutted assertions about the wage gap that, say, uh, Congressmen do, so I wanted to read it to find … wait a minute.

Perpetual Strawman

Egalitarians do not claim that “jobs” account for the entire difference between the median wages of full time working women and full time working men. The CONSAD study found that once you look at all the relevant factors — with a very heavy emphasis on “all” —there is no statistical data supporting the notion that equally-experienced women overall are paid less than men in the same jobs.



What I have found in reading feminist articles about this topic is that the writer will select a few of the factors affecting the pay difference, point out that this does not explain the entire difference and therefore pretend that this rebuts the notion that the pay difference is caused by factors other than gender.

Right off the bat there does seem to be a certain ‘strawman’ aspect to the Salon article, but still, the “Harvard economist” thing couldn’t be dismissed lightly. Salon’s conclusion was that this economist (Dr. Claudia Goldin) said it wasn’t just a question of women going into lower-paying occupations, there was something else at work as well, because there were disparities in the pay of men and women within those occupations. The Salon article concludes by mentioning somewhat ambiguously the need for greater workplace flexibility to help close the “gap.”

Digging Deeper

I proceeded to drill down on the New York Times article the Salon article was based on, entitled Pay Gap Is Because Of Gender, Not Jobs.

If you’re keeping score: we now have two headlines in leading publications claiming that it’s “gender” that accounts for the pay “gap,” not “jobs.”

Returning to the Times, we find this:

Rearranging women into higher-paying occupations would erase just 15 percent of the pay gap for all workers and between 30 and 35 percent for college graduates, she found. The rest has to do with something happening inside the workplace.

Ahh, so even the Harvard economist DID find that the pay gap IS (at least partially) caused by occupation choice (i.e., “jobs”), even though two headlines appear to deny that claim. But it gets better. In the 12th paragraph of a 19-paragraph article, we come across this:

“The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours and worked particular hours,” she wrote in a paper published this month in The American Economic Review. Occupations that most value long hours, face time at the office and being on call — like business, law and surgery — tend to have the widest pay gaps. That is because those employers pay people who spend longer hours at the office disproportionately more than they pay people who don’t, Dr. Goldin found. A lawyer who works 80 hours a week at a big corporate law firm is paid more than double one who works 40 hours a week as an in-house counsel at a small business.

See? Dr. Goldin totally validated that it’s “gender” that causes the pay gap … if by “gender” you mean “hours worked.”

Un-fucking-believable.

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