Today, women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns,” the president said. “That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment. Women deserve equal pay for equal work. You know whats embarrassing? That in 2014, the President of the United States is quoting a statistic (77 cents on dollar) and citing it as proof of lacking unequal pay for equal work, when that statistic does not compare equal work to equal work. It doesnt even compare the same JOB (median yearly salary across all occupations), never mind any silly factors like experience, education, and so forth. It doesnt even compare apples to other fruit, never mind apples to apples. When you control for all other variables and vary only gender -- and sweep things like the staggering pro-female wage-to-talent gap in athletics under the rug -- you wind up with a gap that is a few pennies on the dollar. Which, if it still existed after you control for things like athletics and the effect of uniform tip rate reporting versus differences in tips earned by gender, would certainly suggest wage discrimination. Now, we can argue issues of HIRING discrimination all day and all night. Bla bla bla old boys club, bla bla bla Affirmative Action. But thats not what Obama is talking about. Hes talking about wage discrimination, and to that angle, his deliberate misuse of statistics puts his effort somewhere between urban legend and mythology.
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 12:53:43 +0000
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