Below the fold is a quick take-down of a tag-teamed article from AEI on pay disparity.
It originated as a comment here.
I'm not going to be around until late today; I just wanted to share it in diary form in case others came across the same article, or sees the same talking points.
Thanks!
AEI's tag-team of Intellectually Disingenuous blather...
This piece of drivel from Mark Perry and Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is an intellectually disingenuous piece of fluff that aims to discredit the reality of pay disparity.
Instead of trying to work with actual facts, they toss out scenarios that broad-brush - and in some cases blatantly ignore - realities on the ground to make it appear that any claims of "pay disparity" are simply due to not comparing apples to apples.
In its annual report, "Highlights of Women's Earnings in 2012," the Bureau of Labor Statistics states that "In 2012, women who were full-time wage and salary workers had median usual weekly earnings of $691. On average in 2012, women made about 81% of the median earnings of male full-time wage and salary workers ($854)." Give or take a few percentage points, the BLS appears to support the president's claim.
But every "full-time" worker, as the BLS notes, is not the same: Men were almost twice as likely as women to work more than 40 hours a week, and women almost twice as likely to work only 35 to 39 hours per week. Once that is taken into consideration, the pay gap begins to shrink. Women who worked a 40-hour week earned 88% of male earnings.
Note the above (emphasis mine) - from the wording, it appears that BLS consideration of "wage AND salary" (which combines both pay types) was compared to "wage only" in the paragraph following, which allows the authors to make a claim that appears to be accurate but which is only considering a subset of the original grouping.
Education also matters. Even within groups with the same educational attainment, women often choose fields of study, such as sociology, liberal arts or psychology, that pay less in the labor market. Men are more likely to major in finance, accounting or engineering.
Color me simplistic, but don't many pay disparity claims look within chosen fields of study, like engineering - and find issues? If I recall, in several surveys, women were paid less than men for the same engineering roles - which require engineering background, training and education and not a psych degree. So regardless of what topics a majority of women choose vs. a majority of men, that doesn't mean (but certainly implies) that women who don't have engineering degrees would
of course get paid less than men who had engineering degrees in an engineering role...it's a false argument. A strawman.
Because engineering jobs require engineering degrees, regardless of gender.
Risk is another factor. Nearly all the most dangerous occupations, such as loggers or iron workers, are majority male and 92% of work-related deaths in 2012 were to men. Dangerous jobs tend to pay higher salaries to attract workers. Also: Males are more likely to pursue occupations where compensation is risky from year to year, such as law and finance. Research shows that average pay in such jobs is higher to compensate for that risk.
And again, women work in each of these industries, tho in lower numbers than men.
So compare their wages to the wages earned by men, and you'll still find disparities...but the authors don't go that far. It would weaken, and likely destroy, their argument.
They also attempt to blame women who leave the workforce to be full-time mothers, and then return, as a reason for the disparity - the lost experience in the job force resulting in a lesser skillset of the returning worker than the skillset of the (male) worker who hadn't left the job to be a mom.
They then try to sum up that portion of their report by referencing another AEI report that claimed "a more comprehensive study that controlled for most of these relevant variables simultaneously" virtually eliminated the pay disparity gap: "labor market discrimination is unlikely to account for more than 5% but may not be present at all."
That, of course, wasn't enough.
They then tried to fall back on the "everyone knows" fallacy, presenting the faux argument that if the claim of women being paid 77 cents of the dollar was real, then more women would likely be employed than men:
These gender-disparity claims are also economically illogical. If women were paid 77 cents on the dollar, a profit-oriented firm could dramatically cut labor costs by replacing male employees with females. Progressives assume that businesses nickel-and-dime suppliers, customers, consultants, anyone with whom they come into contact—yet ignore a great opportunity to reduce wages costs by 23%. They don't ignore the opportunity because it doesn't exist. Women are not in fact paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.
See that bit of "ipso-facto" bullshit?
Their final shots blame women, not discriminatory practices, for any perceived disparities because of choice of college majors, staying home with children, and actively choosing to let "their husbands maximize their own earnings."
It's another willful and not-quite malicious, wholly disingenuous piece of pseudo-intellectual babble that has less founding in actual facts and statistics than it does in standard conservative snake-oil.