What the Wage Equality Crusaders Don’t Understand

Women in the workforce are constantly bombarded by rhetoric intended to make us feel less appreciated than our male colleagues. Politicians and Hollywood celebrities – many of whom have never worked one day in a traditional office setting – seem to take great pleasure in telling females that we are victims of the alleged gender wage gap.
Asserting that today’s working women make only 78 cents for every dollar earned by a man, high profile personalities from comedian Sarah Silverman to former President Barack Obama have perpetuated this myth and used it to further their own agenda: more government control over wages.
Unfortunately for these wage crusaders, when the data is examined more closely what we find is not necessarily a wage gap, but what could more accurately be described as a ‘preference’ gap that exists because of personal choice rather than gender.
True, if we were to add up the salaries of every working man in the country, and then we compared that average to the average of the combined salaries of all working women, there would most certainly be a wage gap present. However, this statistic doesn’t tell the whole story.

This post was published at Ludwig von Mises Institute on April 24, 2017.