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Jewish World Review April 12, 2005 / 3 Nisan, 5765 Bad math and the wage gap By Tucker Carlson
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Men earn more than women for the same work. Everyone knows this. If you're under 40, you learned it in school, probably never questioned it.
The only problem is, it's not true. Warren Farrell did the math. Farrell's new book, Why Men Earn More (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.) , takes a deeper look at wage numbers, and finds the conventional wisdom completely wrong. In fact, women earn every bit as much as men do. By some measures they earn more. A never-married man with a college education makes significantly less than his female counterpart. So do starting-level male investment bankers, as well as men who work part-time. In corporate America, women are 15 times as likely to become senior executives before the age of 40.
All of this makes sense. As anyone with a job knows, females have been fully integrated into most workplaces. Many people, including me, prefer hiring women.
Then why do we continue to hear about the dreaded wage gap? Simple: bad math. Intentionally or not, the politicians and interest groups that cite them usually don't adjust the numbers for time on the job. A person who leaves the workforce for ten years to take care of children isn't likely to earn as much as a person who stays on the payroll.
Most of those who take time off to care for children are women. And good for them. America needs good parents more than it needs investment bankers, or for that matter, talk show hosts. So maybe the real problem is the measurement. Maybe what a person makes doesn't reflect what she's worth.
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© 2005 Tucker Carlson |
Mitch Albom | ||||||||||||
