Sorry to burst your feminist bubble and shatter the perfection of Patricia Arquette’s Oscar acceptance speech, but male/female wage discrimination has been blown way out of proportion.
Ever since I can remember, one of the constant complaints of feminists has been that women make about $0.77 to every $1 that men make. According to a video by Learn Liberty, “if you add up all the incomes of women and men and divide by the number of women in the labor force and then do the same thing for men, what you’ll find is, on average, women do make about 75 percent of what men do.”
But you can’t just stop there and claim nationwide wage inequality and discrimination against females.
There is so much more behind this statistic that the majority of people ignore. The problem is that the comparison is not formed based on the juxtaposition of a man and woman working the same job with the same hours and same experience. The comparison is not equal, so therefore the pay is not equal.
According to an article in The Wall Street Journal, one factor that influences women’s pay is the large portion of women who leave the workforce and return after a long break. When mothers leave the labor market, “they have less work experience than similarly-aged males” when they return. This can result in a lower wage not because they are women, but because there is an experience gap.
Another area that affects wages is the type of job that men and women hold. For example, according to a Forbes.com article, “women hold only 27 percent of all computer science jobs.” According to the Learn Liberty video, men tend to make educational choices aimed toward engineering, computer sciences and math while women go into the social sciences, psychology and nursing. The pay in the fields that men tend to choose is generally higher — not because they are men but because of the fields themselves.
Rather than take issue with a statistical pay gap, we should respect what women are doing in fields such as healthcare and social sciences where men are few and far between.
According to The Wall Street Journal, men also tend to dominate high-risk jobs. Ninety-two percent of work-related deaths in 2012 were men. Riskier jobs pay more — not because men are working in them, but because of the risk.
So yes, a pay gap does exist. But it’s not an issue of discrimination and sexism — it’s actually logical and explainable.
And I don’t think it’s a problem either. If women want to work in social sciences and men prefer riskier jobs, so be it. There is nothing wrong with women choosing to take time off to be stay-at-home moms, and it is completely understandable that employers would pay them less because of that gap in experience. But something like that doesn’t make women less valuable, they just work in a way that isn’t measured monetarily.
