The Equal-Pay Canard

Submitted by Mastodon on Fri, 2014-04-11 17:54

Article here. Excerpt:

'The factoid that women earn only 77 cents of every dollar earned by men is the focal point of a feminist cargo cult. It has its own movement and its own quasi-holiday, the so-called Equal Pay Day, marking how far into a new year women supposedly have to work to match what men made the prior year.

The figure is presumed to clinch any debate over the continued existence of massive discrimination against women in the work force. And so the factoid has predictably featured heavily in the latest push by Democrats on the alleged “war on women.”

What is clear is that the wage gap is largely an artifact of the fact that women devote more time to caring for children than do men. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin points out that the earnings of women without children are almost equal to those of comparable men. Feminists are mistaking a byproduct of the laudable desire of mothers to spend time with their kids for a depredation of The Man.

When asked in an MSNBC interview about the reliability of the pay-gap number, White House economist Betsey Stevenson confessed: “I agree that the 77 cents on the dollar is not all due to discrimination. No one is trying to say that it is. But you have to point to some number in order for people to understand the facts.”

There you have it: For people to understand the facts, you have to give them an easily misunderstood statistic, usually without necessary context and spun in the most inflammatory fashion possible. Enter President Barack Obama. He wrings every bit of dishonesty he can out of the number.
...
No matter. Hillary Clinton, whose prospective presidential campaign will be predicated on every feminist cliché her supporters can muster, tweeted on Equal Pay Day, “20 years ago, women made 72 cents on the dollar to men. Today it’s still just 77 cents. More work to do.”'

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Comments

... at the same venue immediately before or after Hillary Clinton addressing the same topics as her, would I be able to claim pay discrimination if she got paid $50,000 for giving her speech while I only got $100? (I doubt I'd get that much!)

Oh but wait: there are substantive differences in experience and so on between her and myself. But no matter: same substantive work, I ought to get paid the same, right?

I wonder if she feels her female peers who've also retired to the speech circuit after a long career of living off the taxpayer and/or their husbands (who in her case also lived off the taxpayer) should be getting the same pay for their important service to humanity in the form of standing at podiums and reciting false statistics and occasionally being a flying shoe magnet? I mean, similar yrs. of experience, etc. But wait, she's HILLARY CLINTON! So it's different.

Remember, Rule One not just of feminists but of those people sometimes crowned as "special" as a consequence of getting elected, or who get appointed to office by elected officials, or people for whatever reason others consider worthy of admiration (justifiable or not): "Do as I say, not as I do." Some things never change.

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Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2014-04-12 06:18