FrontPage Magazine: The Inequality Illusion

Article here. Excerpt:

'An even more significant cause of the gender pay gap is that women tend to have compiled fewer years of uninterrupted service in their current jobs than men. Indeed, women are far more likely to leave the workforce for extended periods in order to attend to family-related matters such as raising children. This is simply a life choice to forego some degree of financial reward in exchange for the emotional reward of being an at-home parent, whether full-time or part-time. During the course of their overall work lives, men accumulate an extra 5 to 9 years on the job as compared to their female counterparts, and each of those additional years translates to approximately 3 or 4 percent more in annual pay.
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Despite the fact that this evidence has long been established, the notion that discrimination explains the gender gap in pay endures. Thus countless women continue to believe that American society gives them a raw deal in terms of pay, and that ill-conceived “equal-pay” laws are the sole solution. In campaigning for the White House, Barack Obama capitalized on this ignorance on the part of some of his female supporters. If his message of “change” was intended in earnest, the president-elect could do worse than begin his tenure by repudiating the old myth of “unequal pay.”'