Last year when I wrote about the phony gender wage gap advocated by feminists and progressives I felt like I was a lone voice shouting at a brick wall. Now that the issue has been dragged into the presidential debate I'm surprised to see that my view has become mainstream.
One of the debate questions asked to the candidates was what they would do about the discrimination that causes women to earn 72 cents for every dollar a man makes. The usual rallying cry is 77 cents, so already we're off to a bad start.
Advocates were no doubt pleased to see the issue take the center stage, but now that it's there people are exposing its flaws. It's not just the fact-checking authorities that are disproving it like Politifact and FactCheck.org, even the cherry-picked studies one-eyed watchdog Media Matters is citing reduce the gender wage gap to 5 to 9 percent and confirm that the gender wage gap in the Obama White House is at 18 percent.
It always bugged me how UFO nuts automatically conclude that a point of light in the sky they can't explain simply must be a vehicle created by a secret extraterrestrial life form. The "U" in UFO is supposed to stand for "unexplained," but they insist they do have an explanation.
The gender wage gap advocates automatically take any unexplained pay gap between men and women and call is discrimination. Much the way some some religious people have used gods to explain any areas currently unexplained by science, known as the God of the gaps argument, modern feminists have created a discrimination of the gaps argument as an easy explanations for things they haven't bothered to answer.
Don't get me wrong, it's possible some of this shrinking wage gap between genders could be explained by discrimination. We need to keep an open mind for that possibility. However, in the presence of additional uncontrolled factors in that 5 to 9 percent range, there needs to be some hard evidence before we can label it discrimination.
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Discrimination of the Gaps
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I would say it's certain that some of it is discrimination. We are a country of 300 million people, I don't need to read any studies to know that people of every race, creed and gender are discriminated against, white male Christians included.
ReplyDeleteSo, the question is whether or not it's significant enough to bother with. That whole diminishing returns thing that is always messing up government programs.
This issue, like so many others, reminds me of the joke with the accountant, the mathematician and the economist. All three are interviewed for a job and are asked what 2+2 is. The mathematician says 4, the accountant says 4 - plus or minus 10% and the economist gets up, locks the door closes the blinds and says, "what do you want it to equal?"