There are few things as enduring as the myth of the gender wage gap. For years, feminists and female activists have fought for equal pay, citing the statistic that "female full-time workers [make] only 79 cents for every dollar earned by men." They believe there is a systematic wage discrimination against women, despite nearly all responsible and reputable economists not taking the wage gap seriously, even feminist economists.
There is no systematic discrimination, nor do women make less than men for the same job.
We need to define our terms. There is a difference between "wages" and "earnings." Wages are the base salaries employees receive and is a fixed payment. In the U.S., thanks to The Equal Pay Act of 1963, it is illegal to base someone's wage off their sex.
Earnings is the amount of money a person earns based on the amount of work they did. This is where the myth stems from and the source of the controversy. The wage gap is the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. Some division is done, and the 79 cent wage gap is born.
The problem is that this does not take into account the different life choices women make. In 2009, a Department of Labor study showed that the gender wage gap is almost, if not entirely, based on the choices women make. Not even counting childbirth, women choose majors that offer less money, less demanding jobs that offer lower salaries, work less hours than men do and take longer vacations. When these factors are applied, the wage gap disappears.
This is not to say women are lazy; most just have different goals in life. Most women do not want to work 50 -60 hour work weeks like many men. As the great Christina Hoff Sommers, a former philosophy professor and current scholar at the American Enterprise Institute once tweeted; "Want to close wage gap? Step one: Change your major from feminist dance therapy to electrical engineering."
Another, more recent variable to explain the wage gap is overwork. Over-workers are described as people who work those 50 hours per week (effectively doubling their salary). This is most common in medicine, finance and managerial jobs, among others, and is different from working overtime or more than one job.
Two researchers from Indiana University and Cornell researched these people and found that over-workers are overwhelmingly men by a rate of 2 to 1. This is one explanation why the wage gap has persisted, despite more women than ever before going into the workplace, graduating from college and putting off having children. It, again, comes down to women's choices.
This is where most activists would jump in, "But women are pushed to do jobs that seem more womanly by society like nursing. It isn't their choice!" Where is the evidence for this? In fact, there is evidence to suggest it is the complete opposite. Research has shown that across almost all countries, men consistently go into jobs of "things" (science, construction, engineering, etc.) and women go into vocations of "people" (communications, nursing, teaching, etc.). In fact, the more "free" a country is and the more options women have, the number of females in "thing" vocations goes down. This consistency suggests a biological want for certain disciplines.
One can't just shout dogmatically about injustices that have no basis in fact. If one wanted to prove a societal curbing of women, they would have to show that there is an economic vendetta against them, and they would have to show that the jobs women are "forced" into aren't the ones they actually want.
Am I saying all women aren't discriminated against? No, but it's complicated. For example, Yale researchers asked 127 academics, both male and female, to rate fake identical resumes from science graduates, the only difference were the sexes. The resumes with men's names on them were rated as more competent and were even offered a slightly higher salary. Is this evidence of discrimination? Maybe, but one shouldn't trust what an academic does in an imaginary case as what they would do in real life.
On the flip side, in 2008, the National Institute of Science did a study on the rates at which both men and women working in science, mathematics and engineering get hired, promoted and tenured. They found that women fair just as well as men and, in some cases, were favored over men.
This evidence is common knowledge and has been used to debunk the wage gap countless times. There is no central, systematic discrimination against women in the workplace; there isn't any evidence for it. If you want to close the wage gap, get out of the gender studies department and become an engineer, scientist or construction worker. If you don't want to do those types of jobs, then congratulations; you're a free-to-choose human being.
