The myth of 77 cents
It’s been illegal to pay women less than men with comparable experience working the same job ever since the Equal Pay Act of 1963. You wouldn’t know that from the way Democrats are pushing a bill they call the “Paycheck Fairness Act.” It’s a cynical exercise in political posturing that would result in downward pressure on wages for all Americans.
The bill’s supporters cite a statistic to prove that pay discrimination still exists: They say women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. The problem is that the statistic is misleading: It compares pay for all men and all women working in all jobs. Economists Mark Perry and Andrew Biggs take apart the myth in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. For one thing:
“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.”
