The gender pay gap is the difference between male and female earnings overall. It is generally suggested that the wage gap is due to a variety of causes, such as discrimination in hiring, differences in education choices and discrimination in salary negotiations. What is the truth about the gender pay gap?
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| Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing well. | |
| This is the truth about the pay gap between the genders, men and women. | |
| Of course, a very, very important topic to grapple because one of the methodologies often chosen by those who wish to diminish your freedom is to set you at odds against freedom and saying that in a state of freedom, of free choice, of the free market, You will be discriminated against based upon gender, based upon sexual orientation, based upon minority status and so on. | |
| And there, of course, is prejudice, sexism and racism in the world. | |
| But one of the things that is quite true about human nature is that we may love our prejudices, but we sure love... | |
| The color green even more. | |
| We like money even more than we like our prejudices. | |
| So the free market tends to punish those who exercise irrational prejudice and it tends to reward those who are egalitarian in their pursuit of talent. | |
| So let's look at some of the facts about the pay gap and hopefully this will help ease some people's fears about the degree to which the free market discriminates. | |
| So, let's start with an introduction. | |
| So, a stat you've probably heard quite a bit is women are paid 77 cents for every dollar that a man earns. | |
| So, this has been all over the media and alongside rape statistics, and you might want to check out my presentation, The Truth, About rape culture, for more on this, it is one of the most common statistics used to highlight the supposed discrimination against women and feminists, of course, bringing it up and lots of other people. | |
| Barack Obama TV ad during the 2012 election campaign stated, quote,"...the son of a single mom, proud father of two daughters, President Obama knows that women being paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men isn't just unfair, it hurts families." So the first law he signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to help ensure that women are paid the same as men for doing the exact same work because President Obama knows that fairness for women means a stronger middle class for America. | |
| So it's important enough to be mentioned in a presidential campaign. | |
| Let's look at some of the truth. | |
| So let's look at where the statistic came from, 77 cents on the dollar. | |
| 2009 United States Current Population Survey, which is conducted for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, researchers found that in the total sample, women on average earned $36,278 per year, compared to $47,127 from that. | |
| That's a 23% gap. | |
| This figure had remained essentially unchanged between 2007 and 2008. | |
| So this 23% gap is calculated by averaging, of course, the annual income or earnings of all men and comparing that number to the average annual earnings of all women. | |
| No additional variables were controlled for. | |
| Is this an example of sexism in the marketplace or the workplace? | |
| Well, let's look at another finding of the exact difference. | |
| Same survey. | |
| People aged 55 to 64 make nearly twice as much as people who are aged 20 to 24. | |
| Is this evidence of ageism, discrimination based on age, or simply an effect of the gap in experience and career progression? | |
| It's sort of like when you compare individual income over time versus household income over time. | |
| If you don't account for the changes in households over time, you don't end up comparing apples to apples. | |
| So, Just looking at the crude statistics doesn't tell us too much. | |
| Let's break down the major male and female earning choices down to more narrow categories. | |
| So, this is weekly earnings by marital status, 2009. | |
| So, married women make $708 per week. | |
| Married men make $936 per week. | |
| Never married, Women make $577 per week. | |
| Never married men make $608 a week. | |
| In other words, it really crushes down the income disparity to, first of all, segregate between married and unmarried. | |
| And this goes all the way back. | |
| And you can look at Dr. | |
| Warren Farrell's book. | |
| He's been a guest on this show a number of times. | |
| He's got a book on the pay gap we will link to in the show notes. | |
| Even in the 1950s, there was a less than 2% pay gap between never married women and never married men. | |
| And never married white women between 45 and 54 earned 106% of what their never married white male counterparts made. | |
| So even in the 1950s era of Betty Crocker and apparently being chained to the stove in a grass hula skirt, barefoot and pregnant, there was less than a 2% pay gap. | |
| Now, marital status is important. | |
| Married often comes with it children. | |
| Of course, lots of women are having children out of wedlock, but in general, there is a tendency towards having kids. | |
| As a stay-at-home dad myself, I can tell you that when you decide to have kids, your time basically just vanishes in a giant airstrike of cuddly cuteness. | |
| So, this is important to understand. | |
| We're talking about two separate categories. | |
| Married... | |
| Women with children are much more likely to stay home with the children because, sadly, Mother Nature has blessed them with the ever-joyful feeding bags, and men, not so much. | |
| Men's nipples are all taps and no plumbing. | |
| So if women are staying home, they're more likely to work part-time. | |
| They also have to be available because of the ridiculous inefficiencies of government schools to pick up their kids long before the end of the workday. | |
| And so those limitations tend to occur. | |
| So it's not just a matter of sexism among employers. | |
| These are choices made by married couples. | |
| What about occupations? | |
| So this is a survey from 2009, and these are the number of survey recipients, the people who responded to the survey. | |
| I won't go into all the details, but as you can see, in healthcare, 74% or 73% of healthcare workers are female, and a smaller percentage of them are male. | |
| Same proportion is very close in education. | |
| Chief executives, it is 24%, 25% female, and the rest, of course, are male. | |
| Architecture and engineering, 321%. | |
| Out of 321 females, 2,076 males, so 12-13% females. | |
| Computers and mathematics, 24-25% female. | |
| The minority, of course, are male. | |
| Now, on average, jobs related to architecture, computers, engineering, and mathematics... | |
| Now, there are some indications that women in general and overall have a slight preference for working with people rather than with things, computers, objects, tools, blowtorches, canned arms, and so on. | |
| And that has some effect on their choices of careers. | |
| And there have also been studies that show that when women have more economic opportunities, they tend to gravitate more towards people-friendly fields or people-engaged fields like healthcare and education, which have lower salaries. | |
| So these are, again, other ways of looking at how this data breaks down. | |
| Doctoral and master's degrees distribution. | |
| This is from 2012. | |
| In the health sciences, 76% are female, 24% men. | |
| Education, 72% female, 28% male. | |
| Engineering, 23% female, 77% male. | |
| Computer science, mathematics, 28% female, 72% male. | |
| And again, health sciences and education, where the majority of women are getting their degrees, are lower paying fields for a wide variety of reasons. | |
| And engineering and comp science and mathematics are higher paying fields. | |
| And it's interesting, just to sort of a by-the-by personal anecdote, when I moved to Canada when I was 11, about maybe a year after I moved to Canada, I saw my first personal computer and got to get my sticky little hands on it. | |
| It was in a math class. | |
| It was an Atari 400 playing Star Raiders. | |
| Oh! | |
| Oh! | |
| I mean, I loved it. | |
| I was fascinated by computers to begin with, and for a couple of years in my early teens, I would take the computers home on the weekends, the 2K PETs and the 4K Atari 400s, and I would learn how to program. | |
| And I programmed text games. | |
| I tried to program a word processor. | |
| I programmed a lunar landing simulation, and I tried to do Missile Commander with ASCII text. | |
| This means nothing to younger people. | |
| But I did all of that, and even on Saturdays, I would go in from like 9 o'clock in the morning until 5 o'clock in the afternoon with a bunch of other guys. | |
| There were no girls there. | |
| A bunch of other guys who were also interested in programming, and we'd swap tips and delve into assembly and all kinds of basically crush your face up against the computer's innards and whisper to it in binary. | |
| And when I then got into being a high-tech entrepreneur in my 20s, the fact that I'd had thousands of hours of computer programming experience It meant quite a lot in terms of how quickly I was able to advance in the field. | |
| So it also is not just your formal education. | |
| It's what kind of hobbies you have when you are a teenager. | |
| And again, that doesn't prove anything. | |
| It's just anecdotal. | |
| But it's a good way, I think, of looking at these kinds of challenges. | |
| So what about work hours? | |
| So the difference, of course, between part-time and full-time is important if you're going to look at people's incomes. | |
| So for those who work, this is from 2009, those who work 1 to 34 hours, women have a slight advantage, $234 a week versus men, $225 a week. | |
| Now, 41 hours or more, a slight advantage, a more significant advantage goes to the men. | |
| $1,014 a week for women, $1,203 for men. | |
| So women are earning 4% more than men in the 1-34 workout range, 16% more for men in the 41 and over. | |
| Now, on average, people who work 41 hours or more a week earn five times more than those who work between one and 34 hours. | |
| So given that more women tend to work part-time, this has a significant impact on closing the pay gap. | |
| Work hours by number of workers. | |
| 12% of men and 25% of women work part-time jobs, which is a 1-34 hours. | |
| Furthermore, 22% of men work overtime, 40-plus hours, compared to 11% of women. | |
| Now, the reasons as to why these choices are made are complex and probably can't be teased out very easily in any kind of mass statistical analysis of questionnaire responses, but it is not, given that these choices are being made, This is how the economy treats this. | |
| If you work more, then you will make more, and more men work more. | |
| So, in the US, the Fair Labor Standards Act requires employees to be paid 1.5 times their regular rate if they work over 40 hours a week. | |
| So, given that more men work overtime, this is not insignificant in terms of the pay gap. | |
| So, women are more likely to get part-time work, men are more likely to work overtime. | |
| People who work overtime earn five times more than those who work part-time, and women generally occupy lower-paying jobs. | |
| And women who have never married earn approximately 5% less than their male counterparts. | |
| Marital status accounts for about 78% of the pay gap. | |
| And, you know, the 5% can certainly be worked. | |
| We could work at closing it, but 5% is quite a little bit different than the numbers thrown around earlier, 23%. | |
| So I think it is important to understand where the pay gap arises. | |
| There are life choices that people make. | |
| I myself gave up massive amounts of work, as I've mentioned before. | |
| I used to write one or two books a year for the philosophy show Free Domain Radio. | |
| I haven't really written a book in six years because I've been a stay-at-home dad. | |
| And that is a huge time commitment. | |
| It's the biggest time commitment I've made, even including working 70 to 80 hours, sometimes a week as an entrepreneur. | |
| It's the biggest time commitment that I've ever made in my life. | |
| And it has an impact on the amount of time that you can devote to working. | |
| So I think it is important because if people can convince you that freedom is unfair, you will run to the protection of the state who will then promise to mediate or remediate these challenges and give you what you so rightfully deserve. | |
| And what happens then is you end up dependent upon the state. | |
| The state power grows because there's always inequality to be found, partly as a result of people's life choices, partly as a result of accidents. | |
| So it's always inequality to be found. | |
| And if we only get the biased and untrue view of inequality, we will forever be playing a whack-a-mole with imaginary devils, use the increasing, ever increasing hammer of the state, much to the detriment of the freedom of ourselves and the freedom of the future. | |
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