McArdle - Most of the Gap Is Not Real

But we can, pretty confidently, answer a related question: How much of the pay gap is driven by those choices, and how much is driven by sexism in the workplace? The answer seems to be that almost all of the gap is driven by choice of occupation, and working hours, with an emphasis on working hours. Childless women who work the same hours as men make very close to what men do.

Does that mean there is no discrimination against women? No. The residual gap that’s left after you control for age, experience, work hours, choice of profession and so forth, is small. But it’s not zero. That residual most likely represents sexism. As a woman, I kind of take exception to that.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-08/government-can-t-fix-real-gender-pay-gap?alcmpid=view

"Genderhawks"

Yet it’s not just evil men and right-wingers raising questions about the Democrats’ Equal Pay Day theater. Reporters bombarded Carney about a new American Enterprise Institute study that found that the salary for the median female White House staffer is 12 percent lower than for a male staffer. Carney meekly replied that at least the White House pay gap isn’t as bad as the national average.

Both the left-wing Daily Beast and the free-market Wall Street Journal opinion pages debunked the “77 cents on a dollar” myth, which inflates the gender gap by failing to account for education, occupation and marital status. Challenged on the White House promotion of junk science, Carney sneered at a Reuters reporter that he “would expect something a little more precise.”

http://nypost.com/2014/04/08/meltdown-of-the-obama-genderhawks/

Ah yes, unicorns and the gender pay gap.

Unicorns and Wage Gaps

Consider, for example, how men and women differ in their college majors. Here is a list (PDF) of the ten most remunerative majors compiled by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Men overwhelmingly outnumber women in all but one of them:

1.   Petroleum Engineering: 87% male
2.   Pharmacy Pharmaceutical Sciences and Administration: 48% male
3.   Mathematics and Computer Science: 67% male
4.   Aerospace Engineering: 88% male
5.   Chemical Engineering: 72% male
6.   Electrical Engineering: 89% male
7.   Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering: 97% male
8.   Mechanical Engineering: 90% male
9.   Metallurgical Engineering: 83% male
10. Mining and Mineral Engineering: 90% male

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/01/no-women-don-t-make-less-money-than-men.html