~ Yesterday was “Equal Pay Day.” It’s April 20th because the average woman’s wage is 77% that of the average man’s wage for the ‘same job’ – therefore, for women to make as much as men do in a year, they would have to work until April 20th of the following year.

~ I have spent a lot of time recently learning about the wage gap and getting different sides of the story. I want to share some of what I’ve learned, and to share a few thoughts on the matter.

      1) The belief that women make 77% for the “same work” as man is most certainly false. To make the point, let’s look at how the data is collected: The U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics creates this number by asking what your gender is, how much you are paid, and what your job title is. The resulting number is that women are paid 77% of what men earn in the same time period for ‘same work.”‘ Does anyone besides me notice the glaring lack of controls used in this study? An honest gander at more in depth studies of this issue will show you that, any time a characteristic is controlled between men and women (say, number of years in the workforce), the wage gap gets smaller. So no, for the 77% statistic to hold, women and men are not equal workers doing equal jobs.

      2) The belief that women are not discriminated against is most certainly false. Extreme “anti-feminists” will often argue that, when you control for all factors like the one mentioned above, that you will entirely eliminate the wage gap. I don’t think this is true – women and men are certainly treated differently to an extent, and we need to keep focusing on the differing treatment in order to dispel it.

      3) This last point has to do with two different phrasings that I used in the preceding paragraph. Notice that the first sentence says “discriminated against” and the last sentence says “treated differently.” It upsets me that the wage gap is always referenced in the former sense as opposed to the latter. It belies the biggest myth of all: The belief that more money is always better. It is only with this assumption clasped firmly in hand that people can say that the wage gap discriminates against women while discriminating for men.

~ This error in thinking prevents us from asking some powerful questions: Why is it important for men to earn so much money? Could it be that men feel defined by how much money they make? Are some prisoners to their careers? What kinds of things might a man sacrifice in order to make more money – health, sleep, family time, dignity? Once we start asking these questions, we might discover the true nature of the wage gap:

~ Money isn’t everything, and it always comes at a price.