Gender Gap Closing!

I missed this the first time around, but now I am "happy"* to report that the gender pay gap is narrowing. On August 31, 2006, just in time for Labor Day, the US Dept. of Labor issued a report that shows a shrinking of the gender pay gap. Here are two of the items they chose to highlight:

Although women, on average, may earn less than men for a variety of reasons, including differences in work schedules and career decisions to accommodate raising their families or taking care of loved ones, education is a great equalizer, accounting for more favorable changes in real earnings for women than for men over the last 25 years.

What has been called the "pay gap" is shrinking and is now the smallest it has ever been since the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) began tracking this data.

Of course, there are two sides to every story.

Whenever people start analyzing large data sets, they somehow find ways to pull out numbers that make their point. Here is another way to look at the same data:


I had to shrink it a little to fit, but you see the point. The gender pay gap is shrinking, but only because the pay for men is falling faster than the pay for women.

The graph is from the Economic Policy Institute's Economic Snapshot for September 6, 2006. They say:

Of course this projection is preposterous, but it clearly shows the absurdity of celebrating that men’s pay is shrinking faster than women’s

If the trends continue, in 2024 there will be no gender pay gap, and men will be earning about half of what they used to make. Contrary to the BLS report, it is not education that's the great equalizer; it's trickle-down economics. If everyone is at the bottom, then everyone is equal.

Or, in other words, a rising tide lifts all yachts.

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* Those are "air quotes, " which I find annoying, but useful. posted by : Joseph j7uy5 | link | | |
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