We’ve talked about the “wage gap” in this space before, by way of noting that as long as you compare apples and apples, there really is none.

The media has carried Op Eds on both sides of the issue this past week – from the sublime (or at least sensible) to the ridiculous.

Representing sensible, Carrie Lukas writes in the WaPo:

 In truth, I’m the cause of the wage gap — I and hundreds of thousands of women like me. I have a good education and have worked full time for 10 years. Yet throughout my career, I’ve made things other than money a priority. I chose to work in the nonprofit world because I find it fulfilling. I sought out a specialty and employer that seemed best suited to balancing my work and family life. When I had my daughter, I took time off and then opted to stay home full time and telecommute. I’m not making as much money as I could, but I’m compensated by having the best working arrangement I could hope for.

Lukas hits on two of the key truths of the issue:  Women exercise different options before and during their careers.  Some pundits – Warren Farrell being a key one – might add that it’s because women have more socially-acceptable options than do most men; while our society is pretty open about women being anything from stay-at-home moms to CEOs, men with kids are pretty much expected to provide, provide, provide (to the point that if a marriage breaks down, or never happens, it’s a matter of rigidly-enforced law).

Women make similar trade-offs all the time. Surveys have shown for years that women tend to place a higher priority on flexibility and personal fulfillment than do men, who focus more on pay. Women tend to avoid jobs that require travel or relocation, and they take more time off and spend fewer hours in the office than men do. Men disproportionately take on the dirtiest, most dangerous and depressing jobs.

Leaving aside dirt and danger, there are some social norms at work here.  Women are more likely to go into lower-paying fields like social work, non-profits, humanities and services; Men are more apt to end up in engineering, technology and sciences, fields that pay more right out of the entry-level gate.  After that, of course, women are vastly more likely to take time -years – off to have and raise kids; men are not. 

If you take a man and a woman who start at a job at exactly the same time, earning exactly the same money, and check back twenty years later, what do you think you’ll see?  If the man has clocked twenty solid years of work without a non-vacation break, and the woman took ten years off in the middle to have and raise kids, who do you think is going to be paid more?

Who do you think should?

When women realize that it isn’t systemic bias but the choices they make that determine their earnings, they can make better-informed decisions.

Smart people – irrelevant of their gender, really, since many men do stay home with the kids these days – know this.

But Lee Roper-Batker, writing Friday’s Strib, does not.

Women’s personal choices are to blame for lower earnings? Systemic workplace discrimination for women is a myth? Rubbish. Lukas presumes that her choices represent the preferences and complex geographic, social, racial and economic realities of women everywhere.

 Roper-Batker then utterly fails to show that Lukas’ example isn’t germane.

 Her assumption is that if women sought “the dirtiest, most dangerous and depressing [of] jobs” like men did, we would achieve equal pay. Tell that to Lois Jenson [one of the Iron Range miners that won the stories lawsuit in 1988 enshrined in the movie North Country] and other women across the nation who “get dirty” fighting to earn a livable wage.

This, of course, is a red herring.  The example of a small group of women who won the right to work a dangerous, dirty job (and, more to the point, not be harassed on the job) has nothing to do with the raw comparative numbers of men and women at dirty, dangerous jobs; even less does it address the real point – that men go into higher paid work because they are expected to, and stay with it more consistently.

Roper-Batker shows a keen sense for comparing apples with axles:

In Minnesota, we’ve modeled how a marketplace can be corrected. In 1982, the Legislature passed the bipartisan State Employees Pay Equity Act. On paper, the bill outlawed sex discrimination against state government workers. In practice, it eliminated the wage gap among 45,000 Minnesotans. Since then, average earnings for women employed by the state have reached 97 percent of average earnings for their male colleagues.

Which, of course, directly supports Lukas’ point!  If you compare apples and apples – people of similar education, experience, and consistency on the job – men and women earn very much the same money.  Indeed, in fields where women start younger and work more consistently (technical writing being one in my personal experience) they tend to out-earn men.

But across the nation, women continue to represent a disproportionate (more than 64 percent) share of minimum wage earners — and an even more disproportionate 40 percent are women of color.

And so Roper-Batker moves on to comparing apples with bowling balls – or at least, we think they’re bowling balls; one doesn’t know what sampling of “women” comprise 64 percent of minimum wage earners; all women over the age of 15?  People over 18, or over 21?  Comparing state employees with a general swathe of minimum-wage workers is misleading to the point of meaningless.  Without addressing why adults are working for minimum wage (or even knowing that they’re adults at all), it seems Roper-Bakter is tossing factoids out and hoping that her audience doesn’t care enough to ask questions.

According to Amy Caiazza, program director for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, economists give three reasons for the wage gap.

One-third is due to differences in skills and education. Solution: Let’s fund expanded education and training for women that will lead to higher-paying jobs.

But women are already a decisive majority of students in higher education – and the number is rising, to the point where people are seeing a crisis. 

Another third is due to job segregation: Women tend to cluster in lower-paying occupations. Solution: Let’s work to expand our girls’ visions of the types of jobs they can occupy.

But we’ve been “expanding girls’ visions” for a couple of generations.  When I was in high school, the girls got endless rah-rah about how they could be anything at all.  And they were!  Among my female classmates from Jamestown High in 1981 are doctors, lawyers, nurses, military officers and noncoms, teachers, scientists, engineers and professionals, as well as housewives and service workers – pretty much the gamut of the American labor force.  If a bunch of girls from all kinds of backgrounds from a rural town from almost thirty years ago are all over the occupational map, how can it be that Lee Roper-Bakter, president and CEO of the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota, can think that girls today, beneficiaries of boundless information, generations of their mothers, aunts and sisters working in the big world, and thirty years of constant pep-talking about their potential (that has made them three-fifths of our college students) could be doing worse?

Indeed – what actual evidence is there that girls today don’t have every bit as expansive a vision of their future as boys do?  Quite the contrary – since women are approaching 60% of those in higher education, after a generation of feminized education, it’d seem quite likely the opposite has happened; boys’ visions are the ones becoming constricted.

(Barring, of course, the girls who get pregnant as teenagers and take themselves out of the workforce, and consign themselves to the minimum-wage ghetto right out of life’s gate.  Of this, of course, Roper-Bakter makes no mention – even though they are a drag on women’s numbers in general.  Five’ll get you ten they’re a big part of the “minimum wage” numbers Roper-Batker cited, but I suspect she’d be the last one to tell you).

The final third of the wage gap is “unexplainable.” Solution: Let’s work together to end factors like sexism and racism that suppress women’s pay.

But other than a disjointed, out-of-context claim about minimum-wage workers, Roper-Batker can’t really make the association between sexism and racism with any meaningful numbers.  Are black women really paid less than black men with similar experience, training and consistency on the job?

These smack of systemic failures to me, but ones that can be corrected. The glass ceiling and gender-typed jobs are not illusions, as Lukas suggests, but social constructs.

At this point in history, Roper-Batker might be right.  They might be social constructs – where “society” means “left-leaning dogmo-feminist lobbyists pimping a government solution that might address a non-existent problem – but will certainly give plenty of power and influence to the likes of Lee Roper-Batker”.

 Just as Lois Jenson’s courage ended sexual harassment as an accepted workplace practice, legislation will end persistent wage gaps.

This is ludicrous.

How?

Let’s take the real-world example that Lukas alludes to, and that I cited; a man and a woman who start with the same background and salary.  How – why – should the government mandate that the woman, with ten years’ less experience than the man after twenty years, be paid the same?

And has anyone shown that male apples and female apples – people with the same training, experience and time on the job – aren’t paid the same? 

No. 

So while Lukas blames women for the wage gap and doesn’t support federal legislation requiring “paycheck fairness,” the state of Minnesota knows better. It has already demonstrated that the proof is in the numbers — or legislation — to correct the marketplace. Now we just need to expand it, for the rest of us.

The piece is instructive in its incoherence.  Although there’s no demonstrable problem, Roper-Batker wants the government to tackle it anyway.

Robbing from the axles to spite the apples.