Sorry, Bonnie: There is NO gender wage gap in 2016!

By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog

We go through this nonsense every spring, Save Jerseyans.

As sure as rain, some dopey Democrat tries to raise money by alleging that there is a “wage gap” in America between men and women. The usual figure is something like women earn only 78 cents on the dollar relative to their male counterparts.

This year it’s Bonnie Watson Coleman (D, NJ-12). “When women succeed, our country and our families succeed,” the freshman Democrat House member declared in a Thursday fundraising e-mail blast. “This loss of wages is holding us all back.”

The problem, of course, is that the claim is complete and utter bullcrap. Sorry for the strong language but certain things are SO ridiculous, and sooo completely devoid of fact that they test my patience and good nature.

First and foremost, men and women make different life choices. Women disproportionately leave the workforce for extended periods of time to stay at home and rear children. Men tend to not stay home. They also choose more part-time work and less-lucrative fields offering more domestic flexibility relative to males.

That’s not a sexist conspiracy; it’s just what human beings do.

bwc equal pay
A graphic from Bonnie’s email (L) and a photo of her enjoying dessert (R)

That’s why it’s goofy for Democrats to rely on a U.S. Census Bureau derived ratio between the respective median earnings of men and women to arrive at their 22 cent gap statistic. When you control for weekly wages? Using Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor statistics, the gap shrinks to 18 cents. Hourly wages? 13 cents. And we’re not taking account of salaried employees like teachers who work 10 – rather than 12 – months of the year.

In fact, Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor statistics show NO wage gap of significance between unmarried women and their male contemporaries; across all professions, they earn 95 cents for every dollar earned by a man. Female union members, ironically, fare slightly worse at 91 cents on the dollar. Controlled for age and occupation? Young women are erasing – and in a few fields, overtaking – wage gaps when measured against men of comparable experience in the same profession.

The bottom line? Legislation isn’t the answer because there isn’t a problem. Women are doing what they need to do without Bonnie Watson Coleman running interference and making things up.

Making it easier for bright young American women to choose higher paying professions would help. But doing so would involve supporting free market economic and social policies that Bonnie’s financiers wouldn’t like so neither does she. So how much does she really care about women?

Only to the extent that she can lie to them, and manipulate them, to raise cash. Tell anyone who disagrees to put up (with facts) or shut up.

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Matt Rooney
About Matt Rooney 8691 Articles
MATT ROONEY is SaveJersey.com's founder and editor-in-chief, a practicing New Jersey attorney, and the host of 'The Matt Rooney Show' on 1210 WPHT every Sunday evening from 7-10PM EST.

6 Comments

  1. As a woman…I have never seen exactly where that gap comes from. Military? Construction unions? Law enforcement? To my knowledge, all make the same in those areas. Corporate? There are job definitions, and assigned salary dollars, if you do the job well, male or female, you earn more; do it less well, you earn less. You fail to explain just what you see first hand and why you think it is so. Life choices do make a difference. I have a sister who accepted a lower paying job to have the same time schedule as her school age child. Her choice to do that.

  2. The wage gap is an abuse of statistics. The St. Louis Fed studied the issue and determined that there was no real wage gap. This is the same type of abuse of statistics that led to the Abbott ruling. You just compare two amounts without looking at what is behind the amounts.

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