Here's Hanna Rosin, at Slate, "The Gender Wage Gap Lie." (Via Memeorandum.)
The point here is not that there is no wage inequality. But by focusing our outrage into a tidy, misleading statistic we’ve missed the actual challenges. It would in fact be much simpler if the problem were rank sexism and all you had to do was enlighten the nation’s bosses or throw the Equal Pay Act at them. But the 91 percent statistic suggests a much more complicated set of problems. Is it that women are choosing lower-paying professions or that our country values women’s professions less? And why do women work fewer hours? Is this all discrimination or, as economist Claudia Goldin likes to say, also a result of “rational choices” women make about how they want to conduct their lives.I don't particularly care or Rosin, by the way. She's the author of The End of Men: And the Rise of Women, which was also featured as a cover story at the Atlantic, "The End of Men":
Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences.I don't have the statistics from my college, but women do very well in my classes. Their success mirrors the general trends folks may have read about regarding "the war on boys." Frankly, there are no neat conclusions on this. What's particularly pathetic, however, is that the president would push a bogus slogan in the State of the Union address to solidify has base. He's such an asshole.
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