Counterbalance: "Wage Gap": Statistically Corrupt, but Politically Correct
Commentary by Darryl Wood, ^©2002 Wood Communications, LLC 

There it was in banner print in the September 19, 2002 edition of the Detroit News: "Michigan among worst in equal pay for women." The idea that American women earn less pay than their male counterparts for the same or similar work is at best stretching the truth-especially when you examine the facts.

The National Organization of Women, the National Committee on Pay Equity, the Glass Ceiling Commission, and the Institute for Women's Policy Research, all cite statistics showing that for every dollar men earn women only make 75-cents. That figure is correct say economist, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, and historian, Christine Stolba, but only if you divide the average wage for all working women by the average wage for all working men. That, they add, results in sloppy and misleading statistical analysis.

In their book Women's Figures: An Illustrated Guide to the Economic Progress of Women in America, Furchtgott-Roth and Stolba strategically lay out the case that when women's wages are adjusted for such factors as occupation, position, age, experience, education, and consecutive years in the workforce, equally qualified women earn 95-to 98-cents for every dollar men make. That's only a 3-to 5-cents gap in pay, not 25-cents.

Rather than a plot to trap them beneath a "glass ceiling" or funnel them into a "pink ghetto" of dead-end jobs as feminist groups popularly theorize, education and job choice determine income say Furchtgott-Roth and Stolba. For example, women's average pay is lower because as a group 25-percent of women work part-time; 80-percent of women bear children-many choose jobs with greater flexibility and lower salaries to care for their offspring. Furthermore, women have not been in the workforce or earned professional degrees for as long as men.

Even so, women today earn 40-percent of the law and business degrees, half of the medical degrees, and 55-percent of all bachelor's and master's degrees; but, many choose specialties that pay less such as administration and communications. Only about 12-percent earn engineering doctorates.¹

Nevertheless, it's evident women are making incredible progress. Not because of corrupt statistical analysis using debatable methodologies, or the victimization rhetoric purported by feminist groups, but because of changes in technology, the law, social attitudes, and certainly hard work.

In case of real sex discrimination, there exists a law to combat and prosecute it. But even the Equal Pay Act of 1963 recognizes that there are times when people will be paid differently for doing the same work, where such pay is determined by: (1) a seniority system; (2) a merit system; (3) a system which measures earnings by quantity or quality of production; or (4) a differential based on any other factor other than sex.²

We don't need a new government solution. As women continue to choose higher academic disciplines and flow from the college campus to the workforce, it's not a question of if, but a matter of when the 'wage gap' will disappear. 

1. Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Christine Stolba, "Women's Figures: An Illustrated Guide to the Economic Progress of Women in
America," in American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research Book Summary, March 1999.
2. Equal Pay Act of 1963 (Pub. L. 88-38) (EPA), as amended, as it appears in volume 29 of the United States Code, at section 206(d)