Even though it's debunked with FACTS and FIGURES, EVIDENCE, THE TRUTH - the Libs will persist in insisting that there is a Gender Pay Gap.

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New Study Confirms that the "Gender Pay Gap" Results from Women Making Different Choices

[mises.org]

In November, Harvard economists Valentin Bolotnyy and Natalia Emanuel published a new working paper titled "Why Do Women Earn Less Than Men? Evidence from Bus and Train Operators."

In the study, Bolotnyy and Emanuel study unionized bus and train operators to determine whether or not a gender pay gap exists, and what its causes might be.

The use of unionized workers was helpful to the researchers because the rigid union rules meant that few pay decisions were left up to managers who might otherwise be blamed for bias in these cases.

As it is, the union rules provided clear rules for how seniority affects pay and setting of work hours.

This allowed the researchers to focus on the behavior of the workers themselves while largely ignoring the role of supervisor decisions.

The researchers did find that a gap existed:

The gap of $0.89 in our setting, which is 60% of the earnings gap across the United States.

But, the gap

can be explained entirely by the fact that, while having the same choice sets in the workplace, women and men make different choices. Women use the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to take more unpaid timeoff than men and they work fewer overtime hours at 1.5 times the wage rate. At the root of these different choices is the fact that women value time and flexibility more than men. Men and women choose to work similar hours of overtime when it is scheduled a quarter in advance,but men work nearly twice as many overtime hours than women when they are scheduled theday before. Using W-4 filings to ascertain marital status and the presence of dependents, we show that women with dependents – especially single women – value time away from work more than men with dependents.

More specifically:

the earnings gap can be explained in our setting by the fact that men take 48% fewer unpaid hours off and work 83% more overtime hours per year than women. The reason for these differences is not that men and women face different choice sets in this job. Rather,it is that women have greater demand for workplace flexibility and lower demand for overtime work hours than men. These gender differences are consistent with women taking on more of the household and childcare duties than men, limiting their work availability in the process. ... When overtime hours are scheduled three months in advance, men sign up for about 7% more of them than women. When overtime is scheduled the day before or the day of the necessary shift, men work almost twice as many of those hours as women.

Women with dependents – single women in particular – are considerably less likely than men with dependents to accept an overtime opportunity. This is especially the case during weekends and after regular work hours, times when there are fewer childcare options available.

These insights are helpful in seeing some specific of how men and women behave in the workplace. They also help to highlight the fact that even when men and women have the same job title and the same job description, the work they do is not homogenous. A worker who works at odd hours (and thus makes more overtime pay because of it) simply isn't doing the same work as a person who requires extremely regular hours. Similarly, a worker who requires sizable chunks of time off every several years (for maternity leave or childcare needs) is also not doing the same work as a worker who rarely takes time off.

If one of the workers is available nearly all the time, but the other one has a far more inflexible schedule, don't have the same job when it comes to actual executions of duties.

Yet, we still continue to hear that "women are paid less to do the same work," presumably because of gender bias. This latest study should help to expose, yet again, that this is an empirically untrue statement, and does not describe the nature of workplace behavior in the real world.

Moreover, this study found a pay gap in a single industry between workers doing similar work. How much more does the heterogeneity of work and workers explain an overall, nationwide "pay gap"? Nationwide, differences in work span across thousands of industries, jobs, and working conditions. The many differences in these cases are uncountable.

Leftists, of course, may see this data and argue that this shows women are still at a disadvantage because single women with children (which are more common than single men than children) are constrained in their choice of hours by childcare needs. Therefore, we need government policies to equalize this situation.

This is true, but only in the sense that, when it comes to earnings, people who work fewer hours are at a "disadvantage" compared to people who work longer hours. It is possible that policies forcing "equality" between people who can work longer, odder hours, and those who can't, could help those who aren't flexible. This, of course, would come at the expense of those who work odder hours right now.

But this is not at all a situation in which "women are paid less to do the same work." And we should stop pretending that it is.

In fact, in a variety of settings, women earn more than men. As Andrew Syrios has noted:

When comparing never-married women with never married-men, the wage gap doesn’t just disappear, it flips. As far back as 1971, never-married women in their thirties have earned slightly more than similar men. 2 In 1982, never-married women on the whole earned 91 percent of what men do. 3 Today, among men and women living along from the age twenty-one to thirty-five, there is no wage gap. And among unmarried college-educated men and women between forty and sixty-four, men earn an average of $40,000 a year and women earn an average of $47,000 a year! 5

And when all of this is taken into account, the wage gap all but disappears, as many studies have found:

* A study by the CONSAD Research Corp. for the US Department of Labor found that once they controlled for the variables, there was “an adjusted gender wage gap that is between 4.8 percent and 7.1 percent.” 6

* A study by June and Dave O’Neill for the National Bureau of Economic Research found that “… the gender gap largely stems from choices made by women and men concerning the amount of time and energy devoted to a career.”
Warren Farrell conducted a thorough study reported in his book Why Men Earn More and found no evidence of a wage gap.

* A 1983 study by Walter E. Williams and the aforementioned 1981 study by Walter Block discredit the idea that the wage gap is caused by discrimination.

* Carrie Lukas notes that “In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts.”

From Forbes - From the OBAMA Reign - Obama pounded that False Lib Narrative (Gender Pay Gap) into Lib Women's heads during his presidency.

Apr 12, 2016

Don't Buy Into The Gender Pay Gap Myth

[www.forbes.com]

Earlier this semester, I spoke to a group of 70 undergraduate women at Harvard, where I am spending the semester. I asked this group of college women if they believed they would get paid 78 cents on the dollar compared to men just because they were women. A majority of the women raised their hands.

To have been admitted to Harvard, these young women had distinguished themselves from the smartest, most talented and most dedicated of their high school peers. This spring, Harvard admitted only 2,037 of the more than 39,041 students who applied to be part of the class of 2020—or 5.2%.

The popular notion outside of Cambridge is that Harvard undergraduates, including the young women I met with, hit the jackpot when it comes to post-college opportunities. And many doors will be open to them in the future that won’t be open to less pedigreed or credentialed job applicants.

Yet for some reason, these young women were certain that a future of gender-based discrimination awaits them in the workforce. That simply because they are women, they will pay a 22% tax with each paycheck thanks to an unfair society that favors men.

Unfortunately, the (OBAMA) White House and many women’s groups continue to perpetuate this idea.

The White House Equal Pay website reports, “On average, full-time working women earn just 78 cents for every dollar a man earns.” The American Association of University Women published a report this spring and asked, “Did you know that in 2014, women working full time in the United States typically were paid just 79 percent of what men were paid, a gap of 21 percent?” And the National Organization for Women website states, “For full-time, year-round workers, women are paid on average only 77 percent of what men are paid… Women still are not receiving equal pay for equal work, let alone equal pay for work of equal value.”

Today, April 12th, has been deemed Equal Pay Day, or the day that symbolically marks how much longer women supposedly have to work to catch up to what men earned in the previous year. In observance of Equal Pay Day, the White House announced it will designate a new national monument for women’s equality and highlighted efforts taken by President Barack Obama’s Administration in the name of addressing the equal pay gap.

It is no wonder college women buy into this 78 cent pay gap myth.

But the White House and others who promote the myth are manipulating statistics in a way to convince women that they are the victims of systematic societal discrimination, and, therefore, stand to benefit from further government action.

Using the statistic that women make 78 cents on the dollar as evidence of rampant discrimination has been debunked over and over again. That statistic doesn’t take into account a lot of choices that women and men make—education, years of experience and hours worked—that influence earnings. If we want to have a fruitful discussion about a gender wage gap, we should have it after the comparison is adjusted for those factors. In a 2013 Slate article, Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, for example, wrote:

The official Bureau of Labor Department statistics show that the median earnings of full-time female workers is 77 percent of the median earnings of full-time male workers. But that is very different than “77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.” The latter gives the impression that a man and a woman standing next to each other doing the same job for the same number of hours get paid different salaries. That’s not at all the case. “Full time” officially means 35 hours, but men work more hours than women. That’s the first problem: We could be comparing men working 40 hours to women working 35.

Women’s groups and politicians, including Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, continue to tell women they are making almost a quarter less than men and use this statistic to call for legislation enacting further government intervention in employer and employee relationships, such as the Paycheck Fairness Act.

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Karin Agness Lips
Contributor

I am the Founder and President of the Network of enlightened Women, known as NeW. I am also a Resident Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics and a Senior Fellow with the Independent Women's Forum. Too often women only hear one side of issues. I regularly speak and debate at colleges, law schools, and other forums to make the case for conservative policy solutions for women. My writing has appeared in The Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report, Time Ideas, Politico, The Washington Examiner, Politico, National Review Online, Fox News, The Atlantic, The Richmond Times-Dispatch, and The Boston Herald. I’ve appeared on Fox and Friends, Hannity, New Day, The Kelly File, On the Record with Greta Van Susteran, The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, Cavuto, and The Laura Ingraham Radio Show. Upon graduation from the University of Virginia and University of Virginia School of Law, I practiced law at Wiley Rein LLP in Washington, DC. In 2012, I was honored to be named to the Forbes 30 under 30 List for Law & Policy.