Details In BLS Report Suggest That Most Of The Gender Earnings Gap Is Explained By Age, Marital Status, Children, Hours Worked

Article here. Excerpt:

'The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases an annual report every year on the "Highlights of Women's Earnings" (since the BLS report actually analyzes equally both men's and women's earnings, one might ask why the report isn't simply titled more accurately "Highlights of Earnings in America"?). Here's the opening paragraph from the most recent BLS report "Highlights of Women's Earnings in 2017" that was released last month:
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How do we explain the fact that women working full-time last year earned less than 82 cents for every dollar men earned according to the BLS? Here's how the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) explains it:

The wage gap exists, in part, because many women and people of color are still segregated into a few low-paying occupations. Part of the wage gap results from differences in education, experience or time in the workforce. But a significant portion cannot be explained by any of those factors; it is attributable to discrimination. In other words, certain jobs pay less because they are held by women and people of color.
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Bottom Line: When the BLS reports that women working full-time in 2017 earned 81.8% of what men earned working full-time, that is very much different from saying that women earned 81.8% of what men earned for doing exactly the same work while working the exact same number of hours in the same occupation, with exactly the same educational background and exactly the same years of continuous, uninterrupted work experience. As shown above, once we start controlling individually for the many relevant factors that affect earnings, e.g. hours worked, age, marital status, and having children, most of the raw earnings differential disappears. In a more comprehensive study that controlled for all of the relevant variables simultaneously, we would likely find that those variables would account for nearly 100% of the unadjusted, raw earnings differential of 18.2% for women's earnings compared to men as reported by the BLS. Discrimination, to the extent that it does exist, would likely account for a very small portion of the raw 18.1% gender earnings gap.'