There Is No Gender Wage Gap | 5 Minute Video — Transcript

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1. 0:02If, for the same work, women make only 77 cents for every dollar a man makes,
2. 0:07why don’t businesses hire only women?
3. 0:09Wages are the biggest expense for most businesses.
4. 0:12So, hiring only women would reduce costs by nearly a quarter
5. 0:15– and that would go right to the bottom line.
6. 0:17Don’t businesses want to be profitable?
7. 0:19Or, are they just really bad at math?
8. 0:22Well, actually, it’s the feminists, celebrities and politicians spreading this wage gap myth
9. 0:28who have the math problem.
10. 0:30Here’s why:
11. 0:31The 77-cents-on-the-dollar statistic is calculated by dividing the median earnings of all women
12. 0:38working full-time by the median earnings of all men working full-time.
13. 0:42In other words, if the average income of all men is, say, 40,000 dollars a year,
14. 0:47and the average annual income of all women is, say, 30,800 dollars, that would mean that women
15. 0:53earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns.
16. 0:5630,800 divided by 40,000 equals .77.
17. 1:00But these calculations don’t reveal a gender wage injustice because it doesn’t take into
18. 1:06account occupation, position, education or hours worked per week.
19. 1:11Even a study by the American Association of University Women, a feminist organization,
20. 1:17shows that the actual wage gap shrinks to only 6.6 cents
21. 1:21when you factor in different choices men and women make.
22. 1:24And the key word here is “choice.”
23. 1:27The small wage gap that does exist has nothing to do with paying women less, let alone with
24. 1:32sexism; it has to do with differences in individual career choices that men and women make.
25. 1:39In 2009, the U.S. Department of Labor released a paper that examined more than 50 peer-reviewed
26. 1:45studies and concluded that the oft-cited 23 percent wage gap “may be almost entirely
27. 1:51the result of individual choices being made by both male and female workers.”
28. 1:57Well, let’s look at some of those choices.
29. 1:59Georgetown University compiled a list of the five best-paying college majors,
30. 2:04and the percentage of men or women majoring in those fields:
31. 2:07Number 1 best-paying major: Petroleum Engineering: 87% male
32. 2:12Number 2: Pharmaceutical Sciences: 48% male 3: Mathematics and Computer Science: 67% male
33. 2:214: Aerospace Engineering: 88% male 5: Chemical Engineering: 72% male
34. 2:28Notice that women out-represent men in only one of the five top-paying majors
35. 2:34– by only a few percentage points.
36. 2:36Now consider the same study’s list of the five worst paying college majors:
37. 2:41Number 1: Counseling and Psychology: 74% female Number 2: Early Childhood Education: 97% female
38. 2:503: Theology and Religious Vocations: 66% male 4: Human Services and Community Organization:
39. 2:5981% female 5: Social Work: 88% female
40. 3:05Here, it’s the women who lead in all but one category.
41. 3:09Even within the same profession, men and women make different career choices that impact
42. 3:13how much money they make.
43. 3:15Take nursing, where male nurses on the whole earn 18% more than female nurses.
44. 3:20The reason?
45. 3:21Male nurses gravitate to the best-paying nursing specialties, they work longer hours,
46. 3:25and disproportionately find jobs in cities with the highest compensation.
47. 3:30Now, here’s how one expert on nursing compensation, Professor Linda Aiken of the University of
48. 3:35Pennsylvania, sums up the data: “Career choices and educational differences explain most,
49. 3:40if not all, the gender gap in nursing.”
50. 3:43The Department of Labor paper concluded that once these differences are accounted for across
51. 3:49all professions, the unexplained wage gap is somewhere between 4.8 and 7 percent
52. 3:55– almost identical to the 6.6 percentage gap found by the AAUW.
53. 4:01But why is there any gap at all?
54. 4:03No one knows for sure, as both the AAUW and the Labor Department concede.
55. 4:09There are so many variables that drive wages that no single study can cover them all.
56. 4:14Few wage gap studies control for variables such as dangerous work environment;
57. 4:18men are vastly overrepresented, for example, on oil rigs.
58. 4:22And here’s another variable: men are more willing and able to work long hours
59. 4:27without advance notice.
60. 4:28According to Harvard economist Claudia Goldin, even if two lawyers have the same education,
61. 4:34same specialty, and work the same number of hours — firms pay more to someone who is
62. 4:39willing to always be “on call” and ready to be in the office when the firm needs them,
63. 4:44as opposed to wanting a more regular schedule.
64. 4:47This isn’t sexism, it’s just common sense.
65. 4:50With more realistic categories and definitions, whatever wage gap remains would certainly
66. 4:55narrow to point of vanishing.
67. 4:58So it seems that business leaders aren’t bad at math simply because they don’t
68. 5:01only hire women.
69. 5:03Those who claim that for the same work women earn 77 cents on the dollar compared to men,
70. 5:08on the other hand, are not merely bad at math --but at telling the truth.
71. 5:13I’m Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute for Prager University.