Thursday, May 30, 2019

Are Politicians Purveyors of Outrage?

The Democratic California senator's stated goal is to produce a world with "Equal pay for equal work." There's nothing wrong with that, of course, if there's actually a problem.

In her new report, she claims, like many others before her, that this is indeed an issue and that "Women who work full time are paid just 80 cents, on average, for every dollar paid to men." That's the foundation of her report, and that number is actually meaningless.

The problem is that these numbers don't compare women with men who perform the same jobs, work the same number of hours and have the same education.

The work of Harvard economist Claudia Goldin, whose work is impossible to ignore on the left, has shown that when measured properly, the small pay gap that remains still isn't the product of discrimination.

There are reasons to believe that as the workplace continues to evolve and with more telecommuting, maybe more paternal involvement in children's lives and a greater willingness of clients to substitute one worker for another, we will see even greater convergence between men's and women's job selections.

Always the enforcer, she wants to require employers with more than 100 workers to go through the trouble of proving to a federal bureaucrat that "They're not paying women less than men for work of equal value" in exchange for an "Equal Pay Certification." If they fail to do so, they'll have to pay Uncle Sam "1% of their profits for every 1% wage gap they allow to persist."

Think about the work produced at think tanks, law firms, or even hospitals.

https://spectator.org/are-politicians-purveyors-of-outrage/

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