Will we use reverse discrimination to “correct” the gender gap the way we disastrously “corrected” the racial gap?

A persistent myth is that, for the same job, women in America are paid only 84 cents for every dollar that men are paid.

I explain below, first, why that myth is false and, second, why it’s dangerous.

There are the several reasons why it’s false. The figures use a category of “full time work” for their comparisons. That’s defined as any work over 35 hours per week. That means a man working 55 hours a week is compared to a woman working 36. So, a man making, say, $30/hour for those 55 hours for a total of $1650/week is deemed to be making $210 more for a “full time” job than a woman making $40/hour for 36 hours for a total of $1440/week for a “full time” job – even though in point of fact, the woman is making $5/hour more.

It’s not like this all balances out in the end because women and men overall work the same number of hours. They don’t. The high-hour work is mainly by men.

A good example is teaching. About 75% of teachers are women. Teaching is deemed a full-time job even though teachers receive three to four months a year off, just like a male construction worker who works year-round. The result is that the female teacher might well earn less annually than the male construction worker – hence that 84 cents figure – while making much more per hour.

If you want to compare apples to apples, consider this. Among workers who work less than 35 hours a week, it’s women who earn more than men. But you seldom hear that statistic.

Another factor is women’s voluntary withdrawal from the work force – something that typically happens when they choose to be stay-at-home moms for a while. Salaries tend to be roughly correlated with experience on the job, so women tend to be paid less because they wind up with fewer years on the job.

Another factor is risk tolerance. It’s a fact that women are less tolerant of financial risk than men. But high-paying jobs very often require the assumption of high risk. That’s why fewer women are entrepreneurs. Few women risk everything to become a Warren Buffett, Bill Gates or Elon Musk because those genes have evolved out of them. The sometimes lethal consequences of risk-taking interfered with mothers propagating and nurturing such genes over the last million years. (It’s different for men. A young child in hunter-gatherer societies can typically survive the loss of a father easier than the loss of a mother.)

The risk disparity between men and women is not just financial. Men are more willing to take jobs that entail physical risk and hardship. That’s why industries like construction and oilrig roughnecking have far more men, while industries like retailing have far more women. Employers find it necessary to pay more for the men in those physically difficult jobs. If the employers paid construction workers and roughnecks the same a retail clerks, men would choose the latter where they don’t risk their fingers, toes and limbs.

Men are indeed often injured on the job. The employment fatality rate for men is about 12-times the rate for women. You don’t see that statistic in the simplistic data purporting to show discrimination against women.

(I can’t leave this medical issue without mentioning the related issue of natural male mortality. It’s a fact that the average life span of men in America is six years less than that of women. Notice that no one ever claims men die early because the culture and medical establishment systemically discriminates against them.)

Back to men and women in the workforce. I personally saw some of the differences in their respective work habits in the practice of law. The compensation of lawyers in private practice is dictated largely by two factors: the number of hours they bill, and their years of experience.

As for the number of hours that lawyers bill, I frequently saw that men tended to bill more hours than women. That was typically because the women often had responsibilities at home in connection with raising children and running the household.

Those are important tasks, and the well-being of society hinges in part on those tasks being performed well. But is it reasonable for employers to pay the women lawyers for such non-work tasks? Isn’t that unfair to women who choose not to have children or choose to pay for in-home help with those children so that they can put in productive hours at the office?

If employers are supposed to pay women for their non-work mommy tasks, then what do you do about the unintended outcome where employers are reluctant to hire young women at all because they know they’ll often be less productive?

Relatedly, compensation for private practice lawyers is related to whether they are partners in their firm, or just employees of the firm (typically called “associates” in law firm vernacular). It usually takes a fixed period of time for a law firm to promote an associate into the partnership – something on the order of 5-9 years depending on the firm. The thinking is that a number of years is necessary for the young lawyer to reach a level of competence and stature justifying the bigger bucks of a partner.

Most law firms now offer parental leave programs for new mothers. (Increasingly, such programs are also available for new fathers, but fathers less often take advantage of it.)

Fine, that’s nice. It costs the firm some money and disruption, but they’ve learned that it also helps them recruit highly talented women, and sometimes men.

But then how are the parental leaves figured into the years-to-partnership figure? If a woman takes a 6-month mommy leave twice, for a total of one year during her seven years to partnership, shouldn’t she have to work another year to make partner? Or are we supposed to indulge in the fiction that while on leave for a year she still picked up the learning, the network, the sophistication, and the lawyering skills picked up by her contemporaries who were working in the office?

People make choices about their careers, just as they do about their families, their spending and their vacations. You actually can’t have it all – you can’t have both the money you would have earned at work and the free time not to be there.

The reason this myth of a “gender gap” in women’s compensation gets pushed, is not to pressure employers to pay women the same as what they pay men for the same work – they already do. Rather, it’s to pressure them to pay women more than they pay men for the same work.

There’s an analogy to be made here to racial discrimination policy. For many years in America, Blacks and other minorities were odiously discriminated against. It was unjust and unproductive.

America finally outlawed such discrimination. It took years, but it largely ended. If you don’t believe me, make a loud racial joke at a cocktail party.  

But in college admissions, Blacks especially wound up not filling a number of slots proportionate to their numbers in society. There are many reasons for this. At this point in time, active racial discrimination against them is probably the least of those reasons.

Nonetheless, justified by a fiction that the reason was indeed racial discrimination, we embarked on a program of reverse discrimination. To “correct” the low numbers of Blacks being admitted to prestige colleges, we decided a generation ago to reverse the discrimination – we decided to discriminate in favor of Blacks and against non-Blacks.

The result was highly destructive to America and to Blacks. Non-Blacks resented being discriminated against on the basis of their skin color. As for the Blacks who were supposed to benefit from this discrimination, non-Blacks came to believe that those Blacks were less competent in a given field because, after all, a large number of them were there not on the basis of their merit but on the basis of their skin color.

Blacks themselves came to doubt their own competence. They were smart enough to deduce that non-Blacks thought they needed special favors.

Finally, those special favors did them no real favor. They were favored in the admission process but, once they were enrolled, they were administered the same exams as everyone else. They were typically unprepared for those exams – after all, they were discriminated in favor of in the admissions process because their lack of preparation necessitated it in order to get them admitted.

The result was a Black dropout rate far in excess of the non-Black dropout rate. Many Black dropouts didn’t re-enroll at colleges that were a better fit, but simply abandoned college altogether.

The analogy between discrimination in race to the “gender gap” in women’s pay is not exact. But the broad point to be made is that rewards in our society should be on the basis of merit. To do otherwise is unfair and divisive, and produces bad unintended consequences.

When “meritorious” is defined by something other than the level of merit, Boeing airplanes start falling out of the sky.

The Supreme Court finally stepped in last year to stop reverse discrimination in college admissions, though it will take decades (and a persistently conservative Supreme Court) to finally ferret it out. Let’s not go down that same tedious and destructive road in trying to eradicate a make-believe gender gap in worker pay.