The Patriot Post® · Celebrating a Myth: Equal Pay Day

April 10 was Equal Pay Day. In the Left’s ongoing crusade against the West’s Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment values — out of which arose the ideals of individual liberty and limited government, a considerable impediment to leftists’ desire for totalitarian government — leftists got creative. Using the Marxist and false delimiter of equal outcome as a means to judge fairness, in 1996 leftists established Equal Pay Day as a PR holiday designed to highlight the dubious “gender pay gap.” While the mean statistic of a pay gap between men and women does indeed exist, leftists willfully ignore and avoid investigating the legitimate factors that contribute to it and level the broad-brush charge of national misogyny. And much like flat earthers, these gender pay gap alarmists refuse to accept that its existence is not due to some misogynistic patriarchy but in fact is a result of people’s right to individual freedom.

Here are a few facts that debunk the charge that women are being paid less for equal work:

Since 1963 sex-based discrimination has been illegal. Employers are not allowed to pay women less for the same work a man does. And data shows that, if anything, today women are actually paid slightly more than their male counterparts for the same work. So, legally speaking, there is virtually no gender-based discrimination. Then why the pay gap? The biggest factor is choice.

Everyone is free to pursue the career of their choice, and statistically speaking women choose college majors for nine of the 10 lowest salary career fields, while men gravitate toward majors leading to nine of the 10 highest salary career fields. Again, no one forces women to make these choices; they are completely free to choose. And a second note is that men also dominate in the most dangerous jobs, which often pay more than less dangerous work environments.

Men work more hours. On average men work two hours more per week than their female counterparts. Men are also twice as likely to work more than 40 hours a week. More hours of work will earn more income. Once again, this is based on choice, not on discrimination.

Men also work more years than women do on average, due to the fact that many women choose to work less or stop working altogether when they have and raise children. As a result, women are not working a career job, often because they simply don’t have the time while they raise children. An interesting data point here is that women who choose not to have children show no difference in salary rates from their male counterparts.

The irony of the whole “equal pay” movement is that it actually attacks the very “justice” it ostensibly claims to be fighting for. The movement belittles women’s free choice to stay at home and raise a family as somehow being subservient to men. Secondly, it judges the value and fulfillment individuals may find in their work solely in monetary terms. If anything, the reason the gender pay gap exists is not because women are being discriminated against, but because many women find financial gain as less of a motiving factor in their choice of a career than do men.

But let’s not let any of that get in the way of The Narrative™.