OPINION:
Most men love women. Every man owes his life to the woman who gave him birth, and many men have sisters with whom they shared their toys and DNA, and finally a wife with whom he shares his life. That’s why men are rankled by the message Hillary Clinton harps on, that men have a bias against women in the workplace. Men get a bigger paycheck, and size matters.
Hillary, who has more reason than most women to dislike men, is counting on women to make her the nation’s first female president. But she won’t do it without the votes of some of the men who comprise “the other half.” The math of her “gender-based pay gap” doesn’t add up.
Mrs. Clinton chose last week’s “Equal Pay Day” to renew her pledge to impose policies ensuring that women earn the same wages as men when they perform the same work. “It is way past time to end the outrage of so many women still earning less than men on the job,” she told an audience hosted by the job search company Glassdoor in California’s Silicon Valley.
Orchestrated with the occasion, Glassdoor released a report titled “Demystifying the Gender Pay Gap” comparing the salaries of 505,000 full-time male and female employees. The study contends that overall, women earn about 76 cents for every dollar men make. Controlling for age, education and work experience raises women’s comparative pay to 80.8 cents. And contrasting men and women with the same job title, employers and location lifts women’s compensation still higher, to 94.6 cents for each dollar that men receive.
That leaves a pay disparity of 5.4 percent, which Glassdoor says is “due either to workplace bias — intentional or not — or “unobserved worker characteristics.” Hillary has no doubt that “workplace bias” is operating here; hence her expressed “outrage” and vow to make sure women get even salaries with male counterparts.
Hillary and her activists are overlooking another important factor, intentionally or not, which is time spent actually working: The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2014 that women employed full-time spend less time working than men: 7.8 hours compared to 8.4 hours. That’s an average of 36 fewer minutes or a 7.7 percent labor disparity — which more than accounts for the 5.4 percent difference in pay. Top producers generally get top pay. Performance counts. Anecdotal evidence can be dramatic, but it can be misleading, too.
Penny Nance, president of Concerned Women for America, says rather than demystify the pay gap, it should be demythologized: “The problem is that it’s untrue,” she says. “In reality, in their 20s women are paid more than men — by eight cents on the dollar in the eight-hour day. And overall, 72 percent of women say they have about the same opportunities as men to advance to top executive and professional positions in their companies. We are now as likely as men to be company managers,” she writes in her new book, “Feisty & Feminine: A Rallying Cry for Conservative Women.”
Hillary’s salary sloganeering leaves her with a credibility gap. Male executives working for the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Foundation are paid on average 38 percent more than their female colleagues, according to calculations by the Daily Caller, an Internet news site. Men and women, coming from different perspectives, nevertheless hear the same message when Hillary goes into her wage-gap rant: “Do as I say, not as I do.”
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