EDITORIAL: The myth of the wage gap

Democrats never tire of trotting out the gender wage gap canard, with presidential nominee Hillary Clinton currently leading the charge arguing that women are paid far less than men, around 77 cents on the dollar. This “fact” is highly misleading but makes such an effective soundbite that progressives can’t resist repeating the dubious claim.

This year, April 12 was deemed Equal Pay Day, symbolizing how far into 2016 women had to work to earn what men made in 2015. A Washington Times editorial noted that Mrs. Clinton spoke that day at a Silicon Valley event hosted by job search company Glassdoor, which helped prop up Mrs. Clinton’s speech with a report titled “Demystifying the Gender Pay Gap.”

However, that inadvertently exposed the gender gap myth. It first contended that women make 76 cents for every dollar men make, but after controlling for age, education and experience the number jumped to 80.8 cents. Then, perhaps most importantly, comparing men and women with the same job title, employer and location lifted the number to 94.6 cents.

Glassdoor attributed the remaining 5.4-cent gap to either “workplace bias” or “unobserved worker characteristics.” As the Times pointed out, Democrats want to believe it’s the former. But the editorial also noted a key factor Glassdoor left out: The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that on average, women employed full-time spend less time working than men: 7.8 hours compared with 8.4 hours, a 7.7 percent disparity. That wipes out the gap altogether.

Actress Kristen Bell, like many in the Hollywood set, recently gave her hot take on the wage gap. But as Nathan Lichtman of PJ Media reported, Ms. Bell destroyed her own argument. She joked that companies pay women 77 cents on the dollar compared with men, then sarcastically said companies should hire more women and pay them less.

Mr. Lichtman opined: “If companies could actually get away with paying women so much less, then why don’t they hire only women? Why would a greedy company ever hire a man whom they’d have to pay more? ... Either companies are soulless, demeaning, greedy places, or they’re sexist and committed to a gender pay gap. They can’t be both. And in actuality, they’re not really either.”

The 77 cents-on-the-dollar wage gap is folly, because it’s simply an aggregate number for all women against all men. It doesn’t take into account key factors such as profession, experience and time spent actually working.

Yes, the residue of sexism exists in some boardrooms and workplaces. But the much-ballyhooed wage gap doesn’t provide much evidence of it.