Here we will talk in simple words with example the truth about gender pay gap, You don’t have to be a mathematician to understand this simple trail of logic.
Let’s jump right into it
The gender pay gap is one of the most ridiculous propaganda propagated by Feminist movement. It has been years that such falsified data was debunked but still some people are either not aware about it or maybe they are just bad at math. It also shows how lasting damages of a false information stays even years after it has been corrected.
Let’s start with common sense.
Think about it, Wages are one of the most expensive outgoing for a business. So if this claim were to be true, why all employers are not lining up to hire women and reduce their expenses by one third. Do these multi bullion dollar business owners have math problem? As it turns out, Feminists, and celebrities who still scream about wage gap have the math problem.
Let’s break it down with an example
There is this widely known claim that a woman earns 77 cents for every dollar that a man earns. Nothing could be far from the truth. The reality however is that when all men combined earn 1 dollar, all women combined earn 77 cents.
There is one more claim that says women get paid less for the same job that men do. Let me make it easier with the example of Toney and Tina.
Example
This is Toney and Tina, both of them work as doctors in a hospital doing the exact same job. Should they be paid same? At you first might think YES Why Not? But hold your horses for a minute. Before answering this let us dive into details.
Toney comes in for work at 7:00am in the morning While Tina comes at 9:00am because she doesn’t want to compromise her beauty sleep.
Toney attends whooping 200 patients in a day and takes only 15 minutes lunch break. While Tina attends only 100 patients in a day and goes off to a fancy restaurant to have lunch with her friends which takes about couple of hours.
Also, Toney goes home at 9:00pm while Tina goes home at 6:00 pm because she wants to make she leads a balanced life.
Faulty Comparisons
We don’t have any objection for choices of either Tina or Toney, they have the complete freedom to choose for themselves, but now if Tina at the end of the month joins the feminist rally and shouts “Me and Toney both are doctors, but because of patriarchy I am being paid less than him”. How fair is that?
Now imagine Tina’s feminist friend who works at McDonald with a gender study degree flipping burgers working same hours as Toney shouting wage gap because she earns less than Toney for same number of hours.
Now, answer the same question, Should Toney, Tina, and Tina’s friend all have same wages? You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand this.
Hard Facts
Now, let’s see what some hard facts have to say for these claims.
AAU (American association of university) shows that the actual gap shrinks to 6.6 cents when you factor in parameters like, education, hours, occupation, and choices that men and women make for their careers. But why? Why should there be any gap at all? Answer to this is the word CHOICE, choice here is of great significance.
The small gap that exists has nothing to with gender but it’s about individual choices that men and women make while selecting their careers. In fact, US Department of labor has published a study on this in year 2009 which drew exactly the same conclusion.
Data on highest and lowest Paying Jobs
One more experiment was conducted at Georgetown university, they came up with list of 5 best paying career choices for college majors along with percentage of male and female admissions in those fields, out of those 5, 4 fields had majority male students. Why? Was anyone stopping women from getting admission in those majors? NO, it was the choice that those men and women made.
Wait for some more; they made a list of worst 5 paying majors as well. Guess the outcome, Yes you are right, out of 5, in 4 of those fields women are dominating.
Was anyone forcing women to take admission there? No, again choices were made differently by men and women.
Hours
There is one more an experiment by Claudia Goldin, Professor of Economics at Harvard University, it showed that wage gap is also job hour specific, the profession in the field of business which does not have flexible work hours have higher wage gap compared to the field of science and research where work hours are extremely flexible
In the ‘Chicago MBA study’ it was seen that women with kids have higher wage gap than women without kids. We are not saying that women should abandon their kids to earn more money but it is one of the many variables which indicate that gender alone is not responsible for the median pay gap.
Verdict
AAU and Labour department both concluded that there are so many variables that it is impossible to cover everything in one single study that is why it is completely wrong to say that wage gap is completely gender driven.