What the Left gets wrong on equal pay

I have worked as a waitress, became the first woman to graduate from the Citadel, started my own business, and served in elected office. At every level, there were people who viewed me as unqualified, unintelligent, and unimportant, solely because I am a woman.

And there is no doubt gender discrimination has resulted in lower pay, less job mobility, or tougher work standards for millions of women compared to their male counterparts. This is unacceptable: Two people in the same job with the same education, experience, and skill should receive the same pay and treatment, regardless of their gender, race, or any other irrelevant characteristic.

But that’s also illegal already, thanks to existing laws such as the 1963 Equal Pay Act and the 1964 Civil Rights Act — laws that my colleagues on the Left often forget exist. Thanks to these laws, women can hold bad actors who practice wage discrimination accountable in our civil justice system .

However, too often, partisans and far-left activists claim that any gap in wages between men and women is entirely due to gender discrimination. They’d like us to embrace a victimhood mentality, holding that every woman working today is helpless. They’d like us to believe women are completely incapable of making their own career choices and unequipped to push for better compensation without the government’s help.

This is simply not true.

First, the raw wage gap routinely cited by those on the Left is misleading. They say that for every $1 a man earns in America, American women earn only 82 cents. They scoff at even the most good-faith examination of where they get their numbers as if it were an attack on their religion, rather than an honest attempt to understand the facts.

The fact is, this statistic is not a measure of equal pay for equal work. It is a comparison of averages. It’s not actually a comparison of women and men in the same profession, who work the same hours, with the same qualifications or experience.

In order to get a clearer picture, let’s briefly look into the data, starting with how many hours men and women work.

The 2019 Department of Labor’s Time Use Survey found the average full-time working man spends 8.32 hours a day on the job compared to 7.73 hours for the full-time working woman.

This is not a reflection of effort — after all, women, on average, spend much more time doing other unpaid work. For example, on an average day in 2019, 22% of men said they did housework, compared to 46% of women.

Of course, hours worked is not the only factor to consider here. The data show that women are generally more willing to trade higher pay for more flexibility, whereas men are more willing to trade flexibility for higher pay. Children also play a role. These are important factors when we are having this conversation.

Once adjusted for factors such as hours worked, compensation packages, and family and marital status, the gender wage gap is actually between 2% and 10%.

Gender discrimination certainly exists. Countless women have shared nightmarish stories of the sexism they’ve experienced in the workplace, myself included. But too often, politicians point to the extremes to reflect what they want you to think is the norm.

Take, for example, Khara Jabola-Carolus, the director of the Hawaii State Commission on the Status of Women and a key Democrat witness for a recent House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on equal pay. Jabola-Carolus described going into labor while working and feeling pressured to complete an assignment despite giving birth. Instead of focusing her attention on giving birth to her child, she worked through the delivery, fearing she’d be “less respected” or “penalized” for missing the assignment.

While we may never be able to eliminate gender discrimination fully, we’ve come a long way to address horrific injustices like this. If Jabola-Carolus were actually penalized for missing an assignment due to childbirth, it would be a serious violation of current laws. She and any other woman could drag her employer to court for such heinous retribution and hold him accountable.

Not too long ago, women didn’t have the ability to make decisions about our professional careers, our personal lives, or where we went to school — all of these have been achievements and successes we've had. I want us to celebrate those.

Prior to the pandemic, women were joining the workforce at a faster pace than men. Women also outnumbered men in earning college degrees. Unfortunately, in the last year, we’ve had over 3 million women leave the workplace due to school closures. This has been devastating to the progress we’ve made in empowering women to pursue their careers. It also has nothing to do with equal pay.

We must continue to strive toward equal opportunity and individual flexibility and freedom for all. But this requires we speak honestly when discussing disparities in pay, accounting for all factors rather than headline-grabbing junk numbers that mislead the public and divide us further.