President Repeats False “Equal Pay” Statistic Claiming Women Earn 77 Percent of What Men Do

Article here. Excerpt:

'President Obama repeated a myth about equal pay and pay discrimination, as the economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth notes at RealClearMarkets:

Last week in the Rose Garden, at an event celebrating the Equal Pay Act, he once again repeated the myth that women earn 77 cents on a man’s dollar.
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Nonsense. The 77 percent figure is bogus because it averages all full-time women, no matter what education and profession, with all full-time men. Even with such averaging, the latest Labor Department figures show that women working full-time make 81 percent of full-time men’s wages. For men and women who work 40 hours weekly, the ratio is 88 percent.
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In any event, it’s just obvious that employers don’t pay women 23 percent less for the exact same work. If they did, employers could (and some would) crush their competitors just by hiring only women, who cost less to employ, to reap a huge cost advantage. But no major employer has ever done so. As one commenter notes, if this massive pay disparity actually existed, “why wouldn’t any company seeking to enhance its competitive position (i.e. all of them) simply hire only women? ...'