When you start to type the phrase “wage gap” into Google, the first suggestion that comes up is “wage gap myth.” When you research the wage gap on Google and YouTube, you will find countless videos, editorials, studies and Ivy League academics “debunking” the myth of the gender pay gap.So the question is: why is the gender wage gap still echoed in the chambers of gender studies classrooms and some social justice corners of college campuses, when the court of public opinion seems to have dismissed it as a myth?
Let’s take a look at some facts and decide. The gender wage gap that you hear about all the time is usually followed by the statistic that says “women are paid 73 cents for every dollar a man makes.” (This number may sometimes say 77 or 80, depending on the source.) That sounds god-awful.
However, this statistic should really be called the “gender earnings gap” for clarity since this statistic is often calculated by dividing the median earnings of all men and women of the year and doing a simple division at the end of that calculation. Unfortunately, this statistic does not take into account crucial differences between male and female workers such as hours of work, time taken off, commission-based pay, education level of employees, job, college major choice or even quality of work.
Well, let’s do some of the math that they were too lazy to do.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2015, among full-time employees, men worked 8.2 hours daily whereas women worked 7.8 hours. Furthermore, college-educated women overwhelmingly decide to study humanities, social sciences or education. Georgetown University reports that women accounted for 88-95 percent of all fashion design, interior design, elementary education, social work and nursing majors, whereas men made up 87-93 percent of construction management, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, physics and aerospace engineering majors.
The fields that women statistically study more pay less than the ones that men do. Gallup polls report that 56 percent of American women with children under the age of 18 would prefer to stay at home than work. This means that more than half of the population of women would choose to bring in no monetary income. This is not because women are lazy. These statistics simply mean that more women are more willing than their male counterparts to devote their time to doing the most difficult job on earth: being a full-time parent. Unfortunately, this choice does not bring in any monetary income.
It is often said that if you were to adjust for all of these nuances including social, educational and level of work differences between men and women, that the folkloric wage (or earnings) gap all but disappears.
It is true that if you were to carelessly take the total paid earnings of all men and women and do a simple division at the end, you will be able to get a figure that shows that women earn 73, 77 or 80 cents for every man’s dollar.
It is clear that it is also possible to take that figure and clumsily label it the gender wage gap to somehow signal that the different work habits between men and women are equivalent to the idea that women are somehow being deliberately paid less for doing equal work. The pseudo-scientific nature of this statistic seems to indicate why certain corridors of social media and social science academia have embraced it while most reputable economists have distanced themselves from it.

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