Do women make only 70% of men's incomes?
The opposition says “Women make 67 cents for every dollar earned by a man.” This statistic is fake. It compares all working women to all working men, but doesn’t not compare apples to apples. It compares women who choose to be cosmetologists or nurses with men who choose to be architectural engineers or neurosurgeons.
“Women tend to specialize in careers where career interruptions are easier to accommodate – teaching rather than computer engineering, for example. Another factor in male-female differences in earnings is that men tend to specialize in more hazardous occupations that pay higher compensation. Although men are 54 percent of the workforce, they account for 92 percent of job-related deaths.” Thomas Sowell, Affirmative Action Reconsidered
According to Thomas Sowell’s empirical studies, women tend to choose jobs that pay less but have more flexibility, less risk, and can be left and picked up later, so we can have children and raise families. The fact that women-in-general make less money than men-in-general reflects women’s freedom of choice. It also reflects these facts:
Women have the babies.
Women quit jobs voluntarily more than men do.
Women choose jobs that pay less, but offer flexibility, part-time hours, and freedom to stop and return later, sometimes years later.
Women tend to choose careers which are not as educationally demanding nor as vulnerable to technological advancement, such as high-tech jobs or high-intensity medical careers, because it’s harder to take several years off from a field such as cutting-edge computer technology or microsurgery, because those careers do not tolerate breaks to raise children.
Married women often choose lower-paying jobs to supplant their husbands’ incomes. They often prefer lower-paying careers such as cosmetics, decorative, service businesses, etc., so they can easily follow their husbands’ careers if moving becomes required.
Women who choose to leave careers to raise children tend to enter the work force several years later than their male peers. Naturally, they start at lower pay rates, as the men did when they first entered the job force. It is women’s choice to start late and earn less in a lifetime. It is not a conspiracy of gender discrimination.
Women choose jobs that offer less physical risk. High-risk jobs pay higher incomes. Most women don’t want physically demanding, higher-risk jobs such as construction, road work, roofing, factory work, crab fishing, underwater welding, painting the Mackinac Bridge, and so on. In a prosperous society, women are able to choose among hundreds of jobs which are lower-paying, but do not demand strenuous physical labor. That is a choice, not discrimination. Women who do tackle these professions are paid the same as their male counterparts if their work history, education, and performance are comparable.
American prosperity has given women these choices.
WHEN COMPARING APPLES TO APPLES . . .
When comparing jobs that are high-risk, require years of uninterrupted dedication, might require moving across the country, and using statistics that analyze single women with no children, then wages statistics become equal between men and women, and often women even earn a little more.
SEE MORE INFORMATION AND STATISTICS IN THE “WOMEN AND THE INITIATIVES” SECTION.