Women’s 77 cents to men’s dollar: What it really means — A Two-part Discussion

Foreword

Over the past four decades, the media, which are supposed to objectively reflect all views, have overwhelmingly reflected pay-equity advocates’ view on the gender-wage gap. One effect of this long-running lack of objectivity and balance is, I think, this:

The advocates have developed an entrenched and immutable perception — it seems to become increasingly entrenched with each passing day — that no other view is possible and that pay discrimination against women is not whimsy but widely accepted fact completely beyond dispute.

In this atmosphere over time, many pay-equity advocates have, I believe, unconsciously built up such a fragility that a view contrary to their own often inflames them and renders them utterly unreceptive to that view. (That would hardly be the case, I think, had the media all along been fair and balanced.) My pay-equity view here is practically guaranteed to inflame and anger these advocates, who throughout their adult life have been fed by the intellectually dishonest media the “incontrovertible fact” of wage discrimination against women.

The advocates aside, ordinary women can hardly be blamed for believing they are paid less than the men doing the same work at their company. Every day of the year intelligent, sophisticated people tell them what the National Women’s Law Center tells them in the very first sentence of its position statement on equal pay (if such important, influential groups as this believe women are unfairly paid less, it must be true; why would they lie?): “American women who work full-time, year-round are paid only 77 cents for every dollar paid to their male counterparts.” (Update: NWLC has dropped “to their male counterparts” — reflecting gender-wage reporting’s apparent trend away from using versions of “for the same work” — and now says, “Women in the U.S. who work full time, year round are paid only 80 cents for every dollar paid to men.” In other words, women suffer wage discrimination even though they freely choose jobs that they know beforehand pay less than the male average. No doubt some feminists, without a shred of evidence, will assert, “No, women don’t freely choose these jobs. They’re forced to take them because employers bar them from higher-paying “male” jobs.)

Part One: Why Women Average Lower Earnings Than Men: Explaining the Gender-wage Gap

Such slogans have inundated society for the past 30 years, angering women and rendering them unwilling to hear other views on the gender wage gap. Source: dayofthegirl.org

When men and women choose their jobs, they tend to be influenced by the principle “what the market will bear.” Perhaps to better understand this principle, think of when, say, we want to find the right price for a car we plan to sell: we may look through the local newspapers to get an idea of the prices being asked by others with the same car in roughly the same condition. We can’t ask a lot more than the average, because prospective buyers won’t “bear” it. Thus, our price is set by “what the market will bear.”

The vast majority of women are (still) either financially supported by a man or anticipate being supported by a man who they consider the primary provider. So most women, influenced by the support of a husband (often unconsciously*), or influenced by the anticipated support of a husband, are able to bear lower pay than men, who as the putative primary provider are expected to do most or all of the spouse supporting.

Many women, married women in particular, might be comparable to teens who live with, and are supported by, their parents and who are able to accept a job that pays little, while their parents must earn enough to support both the teens and themselves. Women as a supported group thus have been able, in the marketplace of jobs, to bear the low-paying positions that men as spouse-supporters generally have been unable to bear. Women often can regard their husband as an “employer” who pays them to work at home tending the hearth and raising the children, while he tends to his workplace and raises the income. So women often need not necessarily seek a higher-paying real employer.

An example of why even the most educated, sophisticated women average less even in the same profession: “In 2011, 22% of male physicians and 44% of female physicians worked less than full time, up from 7% of men and 29% of women from Cejka’s 2005 survey.” –amednews.com, March 26, 2012

Men, after society’s 40 years of pursuing a “gender equality” that has been mostly the righting of wrongs for only one sex, are by and large still expected to be, as stated, at least the primary provider who will take up the slack when the wife leaves the workforce, usually at a time of her own choosing. They are expected to be ever ready to handle most or all of the family’s expenses.

“Primary” providers thus typically experience the same old lifestyle restrictions that sole providers have always experienced. (This indicates that little has changed for men, except that perhaps the pressure on them to earn even more has increased, as women increase their own earnings and then, because of hypergamy, increase their expectations of men: even better-educated women, according to a study cited by the Institute For Family Studies in November 2016, still prefer higher-earning husbands.)

“By the late 1990s, the proportion of women who were ‘marrying up’ had almost doubled to 38 percent. Similar patterns are seen across much of Europe, the US and Australia. Hakim said many women did not want to admit that they were looking for a higher earning partner. They even keep the fact secret from the men they are dating, Catherine Hakim said.” -Eleanor Harding | 4th January 2011 | DailyMail.co.uk

So if a man expects to marry and become a sole or primary provider, he naturally feels unable to bear the pay of a secretary or a clerk-typist. The pay from such jobs seldom is enough to provide for a spouse and family. To the extent the child-caring role has led to women being barred from high-paying jobs, the male’s primary or sole provider role continues to bar men from – in effect prices them out of – lower-paying jobs, jobs which might interest them more or offer the flexibility usually unavailable in the better-paying jobs, the flexibility men often need to become more involved with their children.

A natural outcome of the sexes’ different job choices is women’s 77 cents (currently a little higher) to men’s dollar. This figure is arrived at by comparing the sexes’ median earnings: women’s median is 77 percent of men’s. In 2009, the median income of full-time, year-round workers was $47,127 for men, compared to $36,278 for women or 77 percent of men’s median. (Women’s median for 2017 was 80.5 percent. Go here.)

What are we to make of this wage gap: “In his book ‘Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People are More Successful,’ economist Daniel Hamermesh contends that good-looking men earn approximately 17% more money than not so good-looking men….” Should less attractive men sue to get pay equal to that of attractive men? -CNN’s The Chart Blog, July 12, 2012

Median wage is defined in the Technical Notes in a Bureau of Labor Statistics report: “The median (or upper limit of the second quartile) is the midpoint in a given earnings distribution, with half of workers having earnings above the median and the other half having earnings below the median.”

Think about what this really means in practical terms when you hear that women’s 77 cents to men’s dollar proves women are discriminated against: Plenty of female workers whose earnings are above women’s median earn more than a lot of male workers whose earnings are below men’s median, and countless other women earn as much as, or more than, men in the higher ranges of men’s median.

This is why the October 2012 Atlantic Monthly could report: “In nearly 40 percent of American marriages, the wife earns more than the husband.”

Moreover, “women’s 77 cents to men’s dollar” doesn’t account for the number of hours worked each week, experience, seniority, training, education or even the job description itself. It compares all female workers (age 15 and above) to all male workers. As a result, the salary of a 60-year-old male computer engineer with 30 years at his company is weighed against that of a young female kindergarten teacher. Also, men are much more likely than women to work two jobs; hence, more often than women, a man earning $40,000 a year from his two jobs ($20,000 each) is weighed against a woman earning $25,000 from her one job, so that he appears to be unfairly earning nearly twice as much as she.

“Because people are prone to believe what we’re told, especially when it comes from a person of authority, an incorrect belief can spread like a virus between people. This willingness to believe makes us susceptible to being fooled.” -“Your Bleeped Up Brain,” -History 2 channel, August 17, 2013

“The more often you hear an assertion made, the more likely you are to believe it, regardless of its objective truth.” -“Your Bleeped Up Brain,” History 2 channel, August 3, 2013, “Memory”

This is how slogans like women’s 77 cents for the same work get legs.**

No doubt many feminists believe that “greedy, profit-obsessed” employers (as a feminist friend described them) would hire only illegal immigrants for their cheaper labor if they could get away with it. Or would move their business to another country to save money. Or would replace older workers with younger ones for the same reason.

So these feminists, especially those who insist that even educated women in the higher-wage ranges are paid 77 cents to men’s dollar even in the same work, need to answer this question:

If employers are as greedy and competitive as many feminists seem to think, why wouldn’t they hire only women if, as the feminists say, employers get away with paying females less than males for the same work?

All this is quite at odds with “women’s 77 cents to men’s dollar” as it is feministsplained and presented as prima facie evidence of discrimination against women.

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This might be my symbolic explanation of the gender wage gap:

Picture a couple on the ballroom dance floor. She’s going round and round because he’s going round and round, and he’s going round and round because she’s going round and round. Such a symbiotic relationship is also played out in the gender wage gap: Husbands earn more because wives earn less, and wives earn less because husbands earn more.

When people define the gender wage gap as “women’s 77 cents to men’s dollar,” they miss the mark hugely. The gap is, I believe, much worse. Women may average only about 50 cents to men’s dollar.

What happens if a woman goes from working full-time to working part-time? Her pay is still counted by many people when defining the gender wage gap, and her reduced pay reduces women’s average wage. But what if she then quits her part-time work to stay home and care for her children? She now earns zero wages in her job as childraiser. Should not her zero wages be factored in when we compare men’s and women’s pay? Millions of women leave paid work to take up the job of full-time mothering.

Many other women leave work to take up the job of full-time supporting their political husbands:

“Hillary Clinton quit her law career to support her husband’s political career. Michelle Obama quit her law career to support her husband’s political career.” https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/28/womansplaining-the-womens-vote/

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*I say “unconsciously” because I often hear wives make such statements as “I quit work because I wanted to spend more time with the children.” (Never mind that the husband might want to do the same.) In the 1970s, my first wife, over a year before she decided to have a child, quit her job suddenly (without telling me beforehand) because she “was bored.” Whether a wife quits her job because of boredom or to spend more time with the children, the real reason appears to be unconscious: they left their employed work because they had a husband who supported them, who then in effect became their “non-boss employer” who paid them to stay at home. If they had been single, they would not have — could not have — quit working.

**The slogan “women’s 77 cents to men’s dollar” caught on because of an “availability cascade.” An availability cascade is a self-reinforcing cycle that explains the development of certain kinds of collective beliefs. A novel idea or insight, usually one that seems to explain a complex process in a simple or straightforward manner, gains rapid currency in the popular discourse by its very simplicity and by its apparent insightfulness. Its rising popularity triggers a chain reaction within the social network: individuals adopt the new insight because other people within the network have adopted it, and on its face it seems plausible. The reason for this increased use and popularity of the new idea involves both the availability of the previously obscure term or idea, and the need of individuals using the term or idea to appear to be current with the stated beliefs and ideas of others, regardless of whether they in fact fully believe in the idea that they are expressing. Their need for social acceptance, and the apparent sophistication of the new insight, overwhelm their critical thinking. [Emphasis by Male Matters.]

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Part Two: Proposing a Law That Would Start Closing the Gender-wage Gap Immediately:

Feminists, legislators, politicians, and countless others have tried to close the gender-wage gap for at least 75 years. Here is a list of their failed attempts:

-The 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act
-Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act
-The 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act
-Affirmative action (which has benefited mostly white women, the group most vocal about the wage gap – tinyurl.com/74cooen)
-The 1991 amendments to Title VII
-The 1991 Glass Ceiling Commission created by the Civil Rights Act
-The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act
-The Age Discrimination in Employment Act
-The Americans with Disability Act (Title I)
-Workplace diversity
-The countless state and local laws and regulations
-The thousands of company mentors for women
-The horde of overseers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
-Television’s and movies’ last three decades of casting women as thoroughly integrated into the world of work (even in the macho world of spying, James Bond’s boss is a woman)
-The National Labor Relations Act
-The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act

In light of this long list of failures, I’m forced to say, “Nothing works!”

Thus, feminists could propose a law I think would work. (I know, I know, that’s what they all say.) This law would in fact start closing the wage gap on its first day of enactment:

A law that prohibits men from supporting women, including child support.

Did that make you sit up? Think about it.

Suppose a law barred men from supporting women, in marriage and out, and from spending money on them and giving them money or assets of any kind, directly or indirectly. Every unemployed wife in the country would be forced to get a job. And millions of employed women would be forced to obtain a better one, raising women’s average pay immediately and dramatically.

“Without husbands,” says Warren Farrell, author of Why Men Earn More, “women have to focus on earning more. They work longer hours, they’re willing to relocate and they’re more likely to choose higher-paying fields like technology.”

And how would this prohibition against male support of women affect men? Millions would no longer feel the need for a high-paying job to attract women and gain and hold a woman’s love. A good number of the men already holding a high-paying and likely stressful job would gleefully walk away, sending employers into a frenzy recruiting women. Men would no longer have to earn as much as before, and women would have to earn more. Presto — the sexes’ wage gap would snap shut with a thunderous clap. An ideological feminist fantasy come true!

Say what you will about this prohibition, but it would close the wage gap, especially if men were also barred from paying child support to women.

Of course, such a proposal would never in a trillion years become law, and I wouldn’t dream of seriously suggesting it should. It would turn everyone’s world upside-down.

So, yes, it is utter folly. But it helps put into focus the underlying cause of the gender wage gap — men’s willingness to support women — and that, barred from men’s help, women would themselves close the gap. Feminists would have no need to demand men close it.

Would feminists accept it or protest the loudest, complaining, “It lets men off the hook!”? Feminists seem unwilling to let men off the hook for anything that affects women.

But think through the possibilities, including the unintended consequences.

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The following is excerpted from my unpublished commentary on women’s 77 cents on men’s dollar:

The influence on women of men’s willingness to financially support their wives is  the true, unacknowledged cause of the sexes’ infamous — infamous only to ideological feminists and the liberal media — gender wage gap, women’s 77 cents to men’s dollar. The belief that women earn 77 cents to men’s dollar even in the exact same work has been the sole driving force behind not only the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act but also the defeated but continually proposed Paycheck Fairness Act.

Lilly Ledbetter supposedly helps prove women’s 77 cents is discriminatory. But do you yourself personally know, or know of, any woman who works right along side a man in his exact same job, and, all things being equal, earns 23 percent less than he does? In the journalism business, do the female managers, editors, and reporters earn 23 percent less than their male counterparts sharing the same work room?

At the troubled auto makers, do the non-union female workers earn 23 percent less than their male counterparts working 36 inches from their elbow? “In fiscal 2009, only 1% of charges filed with the EEOC included an Equal Pay Act claim.”

If so, why haven’t these women, as members of the group long taught to sue over the slightest injustice, already sued under the 1963 US law mandating equal pay for equal work? (Some feminists say it’s because women can’t afford an attorney and fear the retaliation from the employers. For supporting data, the feminists usually quote only one female employee who says all this. Probably the biggest reason women don’t use an attorney to sue is that the EEOC is an easier, cheaper route. But see the note in the link immediately above.) And if the women don’t know they earn less than the men, how would anyone else know besides their employer?

But suppose some newspaper reporters — because they secretly have taken on the “side job” of helping women, the “oppressed” — dug up wage data showing that at XYZ Company the women, after all factors such as seniority are figured in, are paid less than the men for performing the same jobs.

Having uncovered this injustice, why would the reporters do nothing more than write a report called “Women Paid Less Than the Men at XYZ Company?” Since they can’t be sure every XYZ female worker was apprised of and heeded their report, wouldn’t the reporters want to make sure — shouldn’t they make sure — that the female workers were in fact alerted to their lower-paid status so they could take action?

Suppose the reporters took it upon themselves to go so far as to personally advise the women of their lower pay, and the women went to their company manager and demanded, “Make our pay equal, or we will sue for the usual millions.” Wouldn’t the reporters then want to do a follow-up report titled “Women Workers File Wage Discrimination Suit After Being Alerted of Their Unequal Pay”? Wouldn’t that be the fitting follow-up to the injustice, a follow-up that dutifully tells employers they can’t get away with sex discrimination?

Yet, although I’ve read hundreds of news reports and editorials (thanks to Google News alerts) stating that “women earn only 77 cents to men’s dollar for the same work,” I have seen not a single follow-up to any instance of women’s lower pay that the reporters and editors supposedly had in mind but failed to mention — not one follow-up showing that the women, as members of the group men often feel will sue for being looked at “wrong,” subsequently sued their employer under the provisions of the 1963 Equal Pay For Equal Work law.

As for Lily Ledbetter, I don’t know how her one case can prove “women are paid less,” sometimes without their knowledge. I do believe, however, that many politicians turned Ledbetter into the symbol they needed to create legislation that would give feminists, women, and trial lawyers the promised pay-back for their votes. But where are the thousands of other such cases that to me are needed to justify a Congressional act bound to burden the country’s employers with added cost that hurts workers of both sexes and which hurts consumers with higher prices for goods and services?

The fact that [Ledbetter] continued to work [there] doesn’t re-victimize her, but hurts her claim that she was in fact victimized. -AustinG, a RealPolitics commenter

For the record, I as a man was once paid less than another man who was hired six months after I was to do the exact same work. (To hire him, my company had negotiated for what it believed to be a talented person whom it had to woo from a competitor company — a common practice.)

So I must ask: How many reporters have ever thought about learning whether men are sometimes paid less — all things being equal — than other men for the same work? If they found just one case similar to Ledbetter’s, whose case is less than ironclad as indicated by the commentaries linked to below, it would blow the Ledbetter case out of the water.

Which may explain why reporters and women’s pay-equity advocates haven’t looked for such data on men. (Perhaps they are less interested in being objective than in portraying women as victims of discrimination who, incidentally, should vote for Democrats, who will save them.)

Those who were in a hurry to pass the Ledbetter Act side-stepped an important point: Women have long been “notorious” for being on average less aggressive than men when negotiating for salary or asking for a raise.

Says Joanne Lipman, The New York Times‘ deputy managing editor, “In my time as an editor, many, many men have come through my door asking for a raise or demanding a promotion. Guess how many women have ever asked me for a promotion? I’ll tell you. Exactly … zero.”

“Men,” Lipman said on CNBC’s December 23, 2014, “Squawk Box,” are four times more likely to ask for a raise than women, and when women do ask, they ask for 30 percent less.”

Far more women than men can avoid the unbearable discomfort often associated with asking for a raise, especially a sizable one. That’s largely, if not solely, because far fewer women than men feel the societal pressure to be successful and to be a primary provider in marriage.

When asked to state a preferred salary range, female applicants consistently give a lower range than men. This female pattern is acknowledged by the feminists who urge women seeking management positions to be more aggressive in asking for what they want. (See Linda Babcock’s co-authored book Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide.)

The pattern is acknowledged also by the proposed Paycheck Fairness Act itself! Note in the act this discriminatory provision: “In addition, the bill would require the [Dept. of Labor] to make competitive grants available that would help provide ‘effective negotiation skills training’ for girls and women.”

I’ll wager that Ledbetter asked for less than her employer’s other managers. So although she may have received the same percent increase in yearly raises, her salary over time fell more and more behind.

Another discriminatory gesture on the part of our president is his White House Council On Women and Girls, which, among other things, will focus on “improving women’s economic security ….” Who is brave enough to explain all this antimale discrimination, pushed by our first black president, to the huge numbers of young men, especially black men, who’ve been jobless for years? Some black men already seem to be disturbed over the White House ignoring black males. We can’t say President Obama has ordered black men to the back of the bus, but we can ask whether he has effectively thrown them under the bus.

Or maybe Ledbetter received smaller raises based on poor performance reviews. “…[H]er years of poor performance evaluations,” says Stuart Taylor in the National Journal, “plus repeated layoffs that affected her eligibility for raises, convinced a federal magistrate judge (although not the jury) that her relatively low pay did not prove sex discrimination. Maybe Ledbetter was a victim of discrimination, as the jury found. Maybe not. The evidence is too stale to allow for a confident conclusion — which is one reason the justices ruled against her.”

“Ledbetter admitted in her sworn deposition that ‘different people that I worked for along the way had always told me that my pay was extremely low’ compared to her peers. She testified specifically that a superior had told her in 1992 that her pay was lower than that of other area managers, and that she had learned the amount of the difference by 1994 or 1995. She added that she had told her supervisor in 1995 that “I needed to earn an increase in pay’ because ‘I wanted to get in line with where my peers were, because… at that time I knew definitely that they were all making a thousand [dollars] at least more per month than I was.'” –Stuart Taylor

All of this is detail that the Ledbetter advocates, needing a symbol of “female oppression,” apparently don’t want to be troubled with.

Here’s an example of how women oppress men and perpetuate the wage gap that enrages feminists against men: “I interviewed one woman who said, much to her surprise, ‘My feelings changed, and I found myself respecting him less as a man. He was a great dad and certainly doing the housework. That wasn’t a problem. But there was something in me that I hadn’t expected. I felt differently.'” [Emphasis by Male Matters] -National Public Radio interview of Lisa Mundy, author of  The Richer

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More on the gender wage gap in “An In-depth Look at Women’s Pay Equity.”

See also: “There is no gender wage gap,” by Christina Hoff-Sommers