6 Comments

  • I have always seriously doubted the “women earn 72 cents for every dollar a man earns” assertion. My wife earns more than me and always has — probably because her resume is better. But like any political correct “fact”, countering it is not merely a matter of data and logic. You’re up against the accusation that you’re an insensitive woman-hating neanderthal. My only conosolation is that most women today — even liberals — don’t really go for the the whole bra-burning “woman power” bit, so stuff like this doesn’t much matter.

  • In fact I supported Hillary 4 years ago because she’d save the taxpayers money! Her salary would only be $288,000/year!

  • Adam Smith used the metaphor of an invisible hand to describe what I call the principle of equilibrium: You can’t sell the same good in the same market at two different prices. That law explains why gasoline prices are so close in a neighborhood, but every time the price of gas spikes up, there are cries of collusion. Lower prices always are considered proper.

    The economic law of equilibrium says that the 59 cents for women per dollar for men figure in the 1970’s and 72 cents now (I read 86 cents a little while ago.) implies that the good of women’s labor is not the same as the good as men’s labor. Serious studies have shown that the law holds with respect to women wages. The biggest factor for the differnce in wages comes from the relative burden of bearing and raising children.

    I talked my boss in the 1970’s to hiring two relatively cheap women with high averages in college courses. What a disaster. As was the lady responsible for several billions of loses at JPMorgan.

    The very capable women in the work place will be rewarded in the market because so many firms have to get their daisy counts high enough to satisfy political purposes.

  • The better answer for Romey to give would have focused on the ineffectiveness of these laws as well as idea that do talented women really want to work for places that under pay them compared to similarly qualified men. The company’s punishment is that they lose a talented employee.

    A good zinger would have been “With high unemployment many are getting equal pay … nothing”

  • “Just one problem: Women make about 95 percent of what their male counterparts earn, if the male counterparts are in the same job with the same experience.”

    72%, 77%, 95%, just so they are paid less, right?

  • […] debunkings of Lilly Ledbetter narrative [Victoria Toensing, Adler, more, earlier] And fact-checking PolitiFact could turn into a full-time job; Hans Bader is still on the case […]