White House Spokesman Jay Carney tied himself in knots this week trying to explain this
inconvenient fact. I'll tell you what he said, coming up.
This week we heard, over and over again from White House, from members of Congress, and from journalists, that women earn 23 cents
less than men for doing the same work. Today, Congress argued over a bill called the Paycheck
Fairness Act, and that bill is premised on this 23-cent wage gap injustice. Well let's
do a little reality check. First of all, no competent labor economist takes the 23-cent
wage gap injustice claim seriously. There was an analysis of more than 50 peer-reviewed
papers, commissioned by the Department of Labor, what they found that the so-called
wage gap is mostly, and perhaps entirely, an artifact of the different choices men and
women make—different fields of study, different professions, different balances between home
and work. Wage-gap activists will argue that even when you control for relevant variables,
women still earn less. Well it always turns out they omit one or two crucial variables.
So, why play this game? A colleague of mine, economist Mark Perry, has been blogging for
several months about the gender pay gap at the White House. It turns out that the median
pay for female staffers is 88% of that of male staffers. White House Spokesman Jay Carney
created a fire storm of protestors among reporters because he tap dancing around this embarrassing
fact. He insisted on the one hand that oh no, women earned equal pay for equal work
in the Obama Administration—and he dismissed the the 88 % figure as being an "aggregate
of everyone on the staff, from junior to senior levels." What he essentially was saying is
that the 88 cent gap is no proof of White House discrimination since it leaves out so
many variables. Well fine, that's right. But they why does the President use the 77 cent
figure which is misleading in exactly the same way?
Reporters pressed Betsey Stevenson, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers,
they pressed her about the bogus factoid. To her credit, she quickly acknowledged that,
"There are a lot of things that go into that 77-cents figure, and many things contribute
to it, and that no one was saying she said it was about discrimination." Well, yes they
are. And activists and politicians have been saying it for years. It is not my claim that
women no longer face discrimination in the US. There is no evidence that I can see, or
most responsible economist can see of systemic wage discrimination against women, but of
course there are still workplaces where women are being shortchanged. But here is the bottom
line: Women who are struggling economically, or coping with gender bias they're going to
be best served by truth, careful research. Not hype, spin, factoids, advocacy data. We'll
l all be better served by truth. The White House, members of Congress, journalists and--everyone
else should stop using the specious wage gap statistic. Just let it go. I am Christina
Hoff Sommers, and thank you for joining me. Leave your questions in the comments section
below this video and we'll try to address them in a future episode. And if you hear
a statistic on women that strains credulity, post it in the comments so my team and I can
check the facts. Then subscribe so you can get an alert about our next video.