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Opening Arguments

Pay grade

"Happy Equal Pay Day!" food for thought:

 To claim that a significant portion of the raw wage gap can only be explained by discrimination is intellectually dishonest and completely unsupported by the empirical evidence. And yet we hear all the time from groups like the National Committee on Pay Equity, the American Association of University Women, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and even Presidents Obama and Carter that women “are paid 77 cents for every dollar paid to men.” And in most cases when that claim is made, there is almost no attention paid to the reality that almost all of the raw, unadjusted pay differentials can be explained by everything except discrimination – hours worked, age, marital status, children, years of continuous experience, workplace conditions, family roles, etc. In other words, once you impose the important ceteris paribus condition of “all other things being equal or held constant,” the gender pay gap that we hear so much about evaporates. And even if we allow that some minor amount of the pay gap is from gender discrimination, “Equal Pay Day” should be celebrated in the first few weeks of January, not the second week of April.

Let's not overlook this whoopsi:

A White Houseadviser had to walk back the oft-repeated myth that women make 77 cents on the dollar that men make after being questioned about the figure during a conference call Monday.

Except, as soon as Stevenson was actually questioned about the statistic by McClatchy reporter Lindsay Wise, the White House adviser crumbled, admitting her earlier comments were inaccurate.

“If I said 77 cents was equal pay for equal work, then I completely misspoke,” Stevenson said. “So let me just apologize and say that I certainly wouldn’t have meant to say that.”

Oh, I’m sorry, I guess when Stevenson said “we see it when men and women are working side by side doing identical work” — that was an accident?

“Seventy-seven cents captures the annual earnings of full-time, full-year women divided by the annual earnings of full-time, full-year men,” Stevenson clarified. “There are a lot of things that go into that 77-cents figure, there are a lot of things that contribute and no one’s trying to say that it’s all about discrimination, but I don’t think there’s a better figure.”

Or this one:

 The White House on Monday looked to deflect criticism over its own pay policies ahead of an event Tuesday on lessening wage discrimination.


White House press secretary Jay Carney was peppered by questions from reporters about an American Enterprise Institute study that found the salary for the median female White House staffer was 12 percent lower than for a male staffer.
I guess all this makes me an unequal-pay denier. I await my orders to shut up because, you know, the debate over workplace discrimination against women is over.

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