The Gender Pay Gap Myth | We separate fact from fiction regarding the "80 cents on the dollar" statistic

The Gender Pay Gap

During the debate, the question about how we address the perceived gap in wages between men and women went to Kamala Harris. She went on to state the statistic that we've all heard before, and that we've likely seen discredited several times. "Women are paid $.80 on the dollar. Black women $.61, Native American women $.58, Latina women $.53. These are common statistics used by many on the left to show that discrimination by men is alive and well in the United States. The only problem is - they are completely misrepresented statistics.

Let me be clear, I am not arguing that on the whole women are making the same money as men. In fact, if you look at those numbers speaking on total earnings by men, and total earnings by women, they are probably true. The problem is that those statistics are being used by politicians to make the case that men are still dominantly discriminating against their female counterparts. In truth, that isn't what those statistics show at all.

What those statistics show is that when one gender tends to gravitate towards lower paying fields, that gender will be correctly represented as making a lower amount of money. That statement my be inconvenient, but it is not evidence that our society is a male dominated discriminatory patriarchy. It is evidence that if more women go into lower paying fields such as teaching or social work, and more men go into fields like Information Technology or Engineering, men are likely to have higher average earnings.

Differences in career choices

To take an honest look at whether or not discrimination is a remaining factor, we must first separate the variables in the equation. One of those variables is career choice. It is not enough to simply say "women make less than men" without considering the different occupations each of the respective genders gravitate towards. Would it make sense to say that "Social Workers make less than Chemical Engineers, therefore we have evidence that there is rampant gender discrimination in the US..?" No, it sure wouldn't, yet that's what politicians are basically saying. I'm not saying that women don't go into engineering, and men don't go into social work, but the data are certainly clear that there are differences in the career choices made by each gender by en-large.

Let's look at a study from the American Association of University Women (AAUW), which measured median pay for the 15 majors most highly dominated by each gender.

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