The “Paycheck Fairness Bill” failed in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday. This bill, proposed by Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., purports to close the income gap between men and women by ensuring “equal pay for equal work.”
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, women make an average of 77 cents on the dollar when compared to men. This statistic has been confirmed by several different studies and an assortment of different agencies over the past decade.
Without question, if you add up all the money earned by women working in the United States and divide that by the number of women working and do the same thing with men, you’ll find that the women make around 75 percent of what the men do.
However, this statistic alone should not be used to justify additional red tape in the hiring process. In fact, according to a study by the U.S. Department of Labor, “the raw wage gap continues to be used in misleading ways to advance public policy agendas without fully explaining the reasons behind the gap.”
In fact, the differences in total pay between men and women are better explained by differences in the career decisions that men and women make. For example, women tend to work more part-time jobs (which pay less than full time jobs) than men do.
Similarly, women tend to take more time off for family reasons than men do. Women tend to take jobs that offer more security, forgoing some “risk-related pay.” Additionally, women take more of their compensation in forms other than wages — things like health insurance and other fringe benefits that aren’t measured in the wage gap.
Most importantly, women tend to select lower-paying careers than men do. While women enroll in college at a higher rate than men do, they’re more likely to major in fields like education and social sciences, which often pay less than male-dominated majors such as engineering and computer science.
In fact, in studies that control for job field, work experience and various other factors — that is, compare people doing truly equal work — the gender wage gap completely disappears.
These factors certainly may be a symptom of underlying inequalities in gender roles and expectations. However, legislation reinforcing equal work for equal pay will do nothing to address those issues so long as the work choices themselves remain unequal.
If we want to close the male-female wage gap, we should instead focus on societal changes on our expectations of gender roles. If we want to close the gap between the total earnings of men and women, we as a society need to shift our attention from the symptoms of these problems to their proximate causes.