by W. H. Lindgren

Created on: April 15, 2011   Last Updated: May 14, 2012

According to an article, "There Is No Male-Female Wage Gap" by Carrie Lukas in the "Wall Street Journal," April 12, 2011, a new study shows women earn 8% more than men. Unfortunately the title is a classic statistical falsehood generated by referencing a very narrow study by the research firm Reach Advisors, which looked at only women, ages 22-30, who are unmarried, with no children, living in the 150 largest cities of the United States which were then compared to men with similar characteristics.

The cherry-picked data were selected from various analyses of 2,000 communities and then isolated to the largest 150 of them, according to "Time Magazine" of September 1, 2010, which uses the misleading article title "Workplace Salaries: At Last Women on Top," by Belinda Luscombe. In truth, there is a very large "Male-Female" wage gap and there has been for decades.

Shortly over a year ago, on April 10, 2010, the "Wall Street Journal" published a similar article by "the numbers guy," Carl Bialik. As one could guess, an actual numbers guy actually chose to report all the numbers which demonstrate a vastly different statistical outcome. Bialik's article is titled "Not All Differences in Pay Are Created Equal" and it deals with the genuine earnings gaps between men and women in the United States, rather than a small sample of a specific, irregular, not normally recognized demographic group (unmarried women ages 22-30 is not a standard subset of the workforce).

The 2010 Bialik article provides the standard statistical figures from the Census Bureau for all males and all females: "In 2008, the typical American woman working at least 35 hours a week, year-round, earned 77.1% of what the typical American man did, according to the latest figures from the Census Bureau. That gap has changed little since 2001, ranging from 75.5% to 77.8%."

A consistent statistical standard persists from 2001 to 2008 is probably reliable. Bialik then goes on to explain some of the reasons for the actual statistics and some of the explanations for understanding part of the gap. The first variable is to raise the hours worked per week from 35 to 40 and the gap narrows from approximately 78% to 87%, but is still a very large 13% gap. Other variables (such as education, experience, occupation, and industry) can reduce the statistical gap to about 9%, which is still a big difference.

Fundamentally, then, the headline that women (generally) earn 8% more than men (generally) is not true. Only

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