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Since the Equal Pay Act of 1963, discriminating on the basis of gender in pay and hiring decisions has been illegal in America. So what are we talking about here?

If you average income for females and compare to average income for males in the U.S., you find that women earn 77% of what men earn. But so what? A moment's reflection shows that this statistic, in isolation, proves nothing.

This calculation, so prominent in feminist circles, does not account for the fact that women are making different life and career choices than men. When we look closely at those choices, the wage gap disappears.

Women are more likely to seek flexible work schedules and to interrupt their careers to care for children. Many studies have demonstrated the correlation between more children and lower pay for married women. A Columbia University study, for example, found that childless married women made 95% of average male earnings, but mothers earned only 75% as much.

Even in high paying occupations women make choices to provide more flexibility and work less hours. In medicine, for example, women are more likely to pursue pediatrics, psychiatry, and family practice rather than surgery which demands more hours. Workers who put in at least 55 hours per week are overwhelmingly men.

No prominent study has ever found pay discrimination where women and men are similarly qualified and work the same number of hours.

If such discrimination existed, and women were working the same jobs for far less money, an employer would logically replace all its male workers with female workers. The employer would gain a huge competitive advantage. It doesn't happen because pay discrimination doesn't exist.

Since systematic pay discrimination doesn't exist by any reasonable definition, activists have long tried to redefine pay equity. Jobs with disproportionate numbers of women, the argument goes, are typically lower paying. Pay in those jobs should be adjusted up to a comparable worth to a job field that is disproportionately male. Perhaps engineering (85% male) should be paid the same as, say, teaching. But such a system would collapse almost as soon as it was begun. There would be an endless parade of lawsuits claiming misjudgments as to the "worth" of a given occupation. The only predictable result is that such a system would make us all poorer.

We have a dynamic economy which offers us far more choices than our grandparents had. The fact that men and women exercise those choices differently is no surprise.

Learn more about this author, Mark Hamilton.
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