What are Democrats for? Dividing Americans and pitting them against each other. One example is the so-called gender pay gap — the idea that women are payed than men for the same work. It’s rubbish, says Kenlee Foskey at The Daily Signal.

“Women earn 82 cents for every dollar that a man earns” is a phrase we hear often reverberated from the left. There are rallies with signs, graphics on social media, and countless columns arguing for equal pay for women using this slogan. This must mean that women need the government to intervene on our behalf, right?

Pay discrimination on the basis of sex is already illegal [thanks] to to the Equal Pay Act of 1963.

But there are other problems with the Left’s assertion. Such as it isn’t true.

This 82-cent statistic doesn’t compare a man and woman in the same job. This number compares the median earnings of full-time working men to full-time working women. What it does not take into account are different fields of study, different hours worked, risk level of jobs, and life choices that people make.

Take hours worked as just one example. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2020, full-time working men worked an average of 8.39 hours per day while full-time working women worked an average of 7.78 hours per day. It is no surprise that those who work longer hours get paid more.

Some fields compensate people significantly more to work longer hours. This leads some careers to become male-dominated, as men respond to the incentive to work more. According to an article in Harvard Magazine, “Non-linear compensation prevails in the corporate sector, finance, and law, where employees are incentivized to work double or triple a traditional full-time schedule, because their time is better compensated per hour when they work longer hours.”

Men overwhelmingly dominate the field of law, which illustrates the idea of non-linear compensation. With research showing that on average men work longer hours and work jobs that compensate more based on longer hours, the gap in pay is a natural side effect.

The types of work women often choose leads to a perceived disparity, as does the fact that millions of women prefer to stay home to raise children. When all is taken into the account, she says, “the wage gap shrinks to 6.6%,” and “there could be myriad causes that could lead to it — not necessarily sexism in the workplace.”

Foskey concludes:

Today’s society has conditioned us to believe that success is an equal number of women in every facet of life or parity. And that the government needs to intervene to make this happen. However, this definition is not what proves to be the most desired. A true definition should be equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome.

The modern feminist movement champions women and their ability to think for themselves and make decisions for themselves. But if they want to show this in practice, then they have to realize that some women will think differently and make different choices than men, which will influence outcomes.

Some women choose certain fields or jobs that may pay less for other benefits, like increased flexibility. Women do not need the government to intervene on their behalf, they need a reduction of government to be free to pursue the life that they want.

Read the whole thing here.