GENDER WAGE GAP - October 2015

Do you know how the gender wage gap is calculated?  If I told you that it is calculated by adding up all the wages earned by men, Column A, then adding up all the wages earned by women, Column B, and that the difference between the two columns is the “gender wage gap,” would that make any sense to you?  Yet, that is, indeed, precisely how the gender wage gap is calculated.

Does anyone believe that a woman doing the exact same job as a man, with the exact same education and skills, working the exact same hours, over the exact same number of years – is earning 67¢ to a man’s 1$?

This myth is hard to kill.  The quarterly publication of the Wyoming Trial Lawyers set out to prove the wage disparity between male and female lawyers in Wyoming.  Instead, the author found that – everything being equal – female lawyers in Wyoming make $500 per year more than their male counterparts.

There are many reasons why women earn less than men:  job choices, hours worked, overtime worked (or not), time off to raise a family.  There are instances where women generally earn more than men – for example, women aged 41-64 who have never married.  And, between men and women aged 21-35 who live alone, there is no wage gap.