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Barack Obama ad says women are paid "77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men"Share this story:

President Barack Obama's re-election campaign has released an ad that focuses on his efforts to eliminate pay differentials between men and women.

President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign released a new ad aimed at women on June 21, 2012.

Here’s the narration: "The son of a single mom, proud father of two daughters, President Obama knows that women being paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men isn't just unfair, it hurts families. So the first law he signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to help ensure that women are paid the same as men for doing the exact same work. Because President Obama knows that fairness for women means a stronger middle class for America."

In this item, we're checking the claim that "women (are) paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men."

The 77 cent figure has become a rallying cry for those who seek to eliminate employment discrimination based on gender. And it’s a genuine statistic. In areport released in September 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau wrote that in 2010, the female-to-male earnings ratio of full-time, year-round workers was 0.77." Translated into dollars, that means that in 2010, women working full-time earned 77 cents for every dollar earned by men working full time.

But the Obama ad takes a solid statistic and describes it incorrectly. The campaign is wrong to say that the 77-cent figure describes the pay differences between men and women "doing the same work." (By contrast, former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine recently earned a Mostly True on a similar claim because he was not specifying the number was for the same occupations.)

The 77-cent figure compares all male and female workers, regardless of their occupation. Whether due to a historical legacy of discrimination or because of personal choice, women and men are disproportionately represented in certain jobs. For instance, women dominate the ranks of receptionists, nurses, and elementary and middle-school teachers, among other fields. Men are disproportionately truck drivers, managers and computer software engineers.

"If more men tend to be employed in occupations that pay higher wages both to men and women, then men may enjoy an overall earnings advantage even if all women in each occupation receive exactly the same hourly pay as the men who are employed in the occupation," said Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institution.

Indeed, if you look at men and women working in the same professions, the pay gap is much smaller (though for most professions, it doesn’t disappear entirely).

For computer programmers, for instance, women earn 95 cents for every dollar a man earns. For cashiers it’s 92 cents. For cooks and customer service representatives, it’s 95 cents. Other occupations have more unequal ratios. Women who are personal financial advisers, for instance, earn just 58 cents of what men in that job earn. (The statistics come from theInstitute for Women’s Policy Research, a think tank focusing on women’s issues.)

There are at least two other factors that weaken the accuracy of the ad’s claim.

One involves hours worked. While calculations that led to the 77-cent figure did not include any part-time workers, the label "full time worker" can actually be applied to employees with a wide range of hours worked per week.

The official Bureau of Labor Statistics definition of a full-time worker is someone who works at least 35 hours per week. Someone who gets no vacation time and works 40 hours a week for 52 weeks would work 2,080 hours in a year. By contrast, a worker on a 36-hour-per-week schedule who has two weeks off would work only 1,800 hours. Meanwhile, a worker with two weeks off who averaged four hours per week of overtime would end up with 2,200 hours.

"Some workers have even longer work schedules than that, especially when the economy is expanding rapidly," Burtless said. "So even among full-time, year-round workers, there is considerable variability in annual work hours." This variation can work its way into the gender pay gap if women seek more flexible schedules or if men happen to fill jobs with greater opportunities for overtime.

(PolitiFact has noted that Burtless contributed $750 to Obama’s campaign in 2011. However, in 2008 he provided advice on aspects of labor policy to the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and he has worked as a government economist and served on federal advisory panels under presidents of both parties.)

The other complicating factor involves seniority on the job. Men have typically held their jobs longer than women in the same position. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, men in 2010 who were between 45 and 54 years old had a median job tenure of 8.5 years, compared to 7.1 years for women in the same age group.

"Women have shorter job tenures than men because they have more work interruptions than men, usually because they have children and assume heavy responsibility for rearing those children," Burtless said. Improving access to child care or offering stronger protections for workers who leave the workforce temporarily to raise children, as some other advanced industrialized nations do, would probably decrease the wage gap, Burtless said.

When we contacted the Obama campaign, they reiterated the importance of the overall figures and noted a Bloomberg analysis that showed that only one occupation out of 265 with more than 10,000 men and women employed did women out-earn men -- namely, "personal care and service workers, which include butlers, valets, house sitters and shoe shiners."

"No matter how you look at it, women make less than men -- at the same job, at different jobs, weekly, annually and by occupation," said Kara Carscaden, a spokeswoman for the Obama campaign.

Nothing in our analysis suggests that gender discrimination doesn’t exist. In fact, the experts we consulted agreed that no matter how much you adjust the models to equalize for outside factors, a difference in pay between men and women remains, and it’s one that can’t be explained away.

Still, those same experts also agreed that ad goes too far in claiming that the 77-cent statistic describes the pay gap for women "doing the same work as men."

"Sexism may explain differences in occupation, industry, education, hours and weeks worked, so it’s hard to know how much of the gap is due to discrimination. But (77 cents) isn’t the right statistic for saying ‘the same work as,’" said Betsey Stevenson, a business and public policy professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and visiting economics professor at Princeton University who previously served as chief economist for Obama’s labor secretary.

Burtless agreed. "It’s hard to defend the last seven words in the ad’s claim."

Our ruling

The Obama campaign took a legitimate statistic and described it in a way that makes it sound much more dramatic than it actually is. The 77-cent figure is real, but it does not factor in occupations held, hours worked or length of tenure. Describing that statistic as referring to the pay for women "doing the same work as men" earns it a rating of Mostly False.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Kay Hymowitz: Why Women Make Less Than Men
In studies from the U.S. to Sweden, pay discrimination can't explain the disparity. Women earn less because they work fewer hours.


By KAY HYMOWITZ

First, the Atlantic magazine announced "the end of men." Then a Time cover story in March proclaimed that women are becoming "the richer sex." Now a Pew Research Center report tells us that young women have become more likely than young men to say that a high-paying career is very important to them. Are we really in the midst of what Pew calls a "gender reversal?"

One stubborn fact of the labor market argues against the idea. That is the gender-hours gap, close cousin of the gender-wage gap. Most people have heard that full-time working American women earn only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. Yet these numbers don't take into account the actual number of hours worked. And it turns out that women work fewer hours than men.

The Labor Department defines full-time as 35 hours a week or more, and the "or more" is far more likely to refer to male workers than to female ones. According to the department, almost 55% of workers logging more than 35 hours a week are men. In 2007, 25% of men working full-time jobs had workweeks of 41 or more hours, compared with 14% of female full-time workers. In other words, the famous gender-wage gap is to a considerable degree a gender-hours gap.

The main reason that women spend less time at work than men—and that women are unlikely to be the richer sex—is obvious: children. Today, childless 20-something women do earn more than their male peers. But most are likely to cut back their hours after they have kids, giving men the hours, and income, advantage.

One study by the American Association for University Women looked at women who graduated from college in 1992-93 and found that 23% of those who had become mothers were out of the workforce in 2003; another 17% were working part-time. Fewer than 2% of fathers fell into those categories. Another study, of M.B.A. graduates from Chicago's Booth School, discovered that only half of women with children were working full-time 10 years after graduation, compared with 95% of men.

Women, in fact, make up two-thirds of America's part-time workforce. A just-released report from the New York Federal Reserve has even found that "opting-out" by midcareer college-educated wives, especially those with wealthy husbands, has been increasing over the past 20 years.

Activists tend to offer two solutions for this state of affairs. First is that fathers should take equal responsibility for child care. After all, while men have tripled the number of hours they're in charge of the kids since 1970, women still put in more hours on the domestic front. But even if we could put a magic potion in the nation's water supply and turn 50% of men into Mr. Mom, that still leaves the growing number of women with no father in the house. Over 40% of American children are now born to unmarried women. A significant number—though not a majority—are living with their child's father at birth. But in the next few years when those couples break up, which is what studies show they tend to do, guess who will be left minding the kids?

Which brings us to the second proposed solution for the hours gap: generous family-leave and child-care policies. Sweden and Iceland are frequently held up as models in this regard, and they do have some of the most extensive paternity and maternity leave and publicly funded child care in the world.

Yet even they also have a persistent hours and wage gap. In both countries, mothers still take more time off than fathers after the baby arrives. When they do go back to work, they're on the job for fewer hours. Iceland's income gap is a yawning 38%—that is, the average women earns only 62 cents to a man's dollar. Even Sweden's 15% gap—though lower than our 23% one—is far from full parity.

All over the developed world women make up the large majority of the part-time workforce, and surveys suggest they want it that way. According to the Netherlands Institute for Social Research, in 2008 only 4% of the 70% of Dutch women who worked part-time wished they had a full-time job. A British Household Panel Survey interviewing 3,800 couples discovered that among British women, the happiest were those working part-time.

A 2007 Pew Research survey came up with similar results for American women: Among working mothers with minor children, 60% said they would prefer to work part-time, while only 21% wanted to be in the office full-time (and 19% said they'd like to give up their job altogether). How about working fathers? Only 12% would choose part-time and 70% wanted to be full-time.

Some counter that the hours gap would shrink if employers offered more family-friendly policies, such as flexible hours and easier on-off ramps for moving in and out of the workforce. We don't know if there is a way to design workplaces so that women would work more or men would work less or both. What we do know is that no one, anywhere, has yet figured out how to do it. Which means that for the foreseeable future, at least when it comes to income, women will remain the second sex.

A version of this article appeared April 26, 2012, on page A15 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Why Women Make Less Than Men.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Why the U.S. Economy Is Biased Against Men
By Marty Nemko

That women earn 77 cents for every $1 earned by a man is a popular refrain. But look closer. Prejudice against guys in the economy is real and widespread. 

Update: Also see the response column, Why the Economy Is Not Biased Against Men]

You've just landed on Planet Zuto.

The Intergalactic Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (IEEOC) has sent you to determine whether Zuto's economy is fair to its two sexes: vozems and zems. Your boss suggests you'll probably find sexism against the vozems.

But your first discovery is that 60 vozems graduate from college for every 40 zems. You discover clues as to why. Despite the under-representation of zems, many scholarships are set aside for vozems, few for zems. The curriculum accentuates vozems' accomplishments, zems' failings. Student groups are funded to encourage vozems, for example, Future BusinessVozems, far fewer for zems.

You beam your first report back to the IEEOC: Zuto U's appear to be sexist against zems, not vozems.

Next, you examine the Zuto Bureau of Labor Statistics and find that the unemployment rate for vozems is 20% lower than for zems. You are shocked to discover that rather than trying to help zems land work, the government deliberately exacerbates zems' deficit: vozem-owned businesses get special preferences in landing government contracts and taxpayer-backed small-business loans are set aside for vozems.

You beam back your next report to the IEEOC: More signs of sexism against zems. Your boss responds, "But vozems earn 77 zits for every 100 zems earn!"

***

Unless you really are from Planet Zuto, you know that the preceding was about men and women. Indeed, every statement made about Zuto is true of the U.S. And so are these.

The 77-cents-on-the-dollars statistic is calculated in a way that is biased against men. For example, while among all physicians, men earn more than women, men are more likely to be in specialties requiring longer training, high-stress, and irregular hours, for example, surgery and cardiology. In contrast, women are more likely to be pediatricians. Despite that bias, across all careers, surveys report that childless women under 30 make more than men. More than 90 percent of workplace deaths, military deaths, and severe workplace injuries (e.g., amputations, black lung disease) occur to men. Such dangerous work justify higher pay for men.

Visit American workplaces, especially major corporations, and you'll find that anti-men practices are not only tolerated but routinely imposed by employers. Women but not men are encouraged to form committees and caucuses to advance their sex's causes in the workplace, often at men's expense. Examples: 

• Mentor programs for women only 

• Special training for women only 

• Fast-track-to-executive position for women only 

In honest conversation, most people will agree that, on average, men are more often willing to do the things it takes to get promoted, for example, to make time to take advanced technical courses by forgoing recreation such as sports or shopping. Men are more likely to be willing to move to a God-forsaken place (Montgomery, Alabama, anyone?) for a promotion, and, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, to work longer hours.

Most people will also agree that, on average, women are more eager to have children and to be deeply involving in their upbringing. So women's committees and caucuses, with the help of outside advocacy groups with close ties to the media such as Catalyst, NOW, and AAUW, have pressured workplaces to institute programs for employees' children, for example:

• On-site child care, which diverts money from all employees' salaries and/or raises company products' prices, which ultimately costs jobs. 

• Formal or informal policies that allow parents to leave work early, for example, to attend their kid's soccer game, leaving non-parents of both sexes to pick up the slack. And those non-parents, especially men, dare not raise a peep of objection lest they be dubbed sexist, which can hurt their career. 

• Women's advocacy groups also were successful in pressuring the government to create The Family and Medical Leave Act*, which allows employees to--usually with minimal verification of need--take up to 12 weeks every year(!) to care for a relative, with a guarantee that their job will be held for them until they choose to return. (Women take the majority of FMLA days.) Now those advocacy groups are pressuring employers to make FMLA days-off paid days. 

• For parents (again, disproportionately women) who wish to take years off to raise their offspring, many corporations have established on-ramps to help them get their career back despite having lost their technical and Rolodex's currency, and now often being less committed to work than are their non-parent coworkers. 


GIRLS RULE

The workplace cultural practices more often preferred by men have largely been replaced by approaches more often preferred by women. Individual initiative is now usually deemed inferior to teamwork, competition often replaced by collaboration, "push through to get the job done" with "process feelings," decision-making by leader with decision-making by committee. Men are more likely than women to throw all of themselves into work than to demand worklife balance, for which they are often dubbed with pathologizing monikers such as "workaholic" and "unable to relax" rather than "heroic" for being so contributory, even if it costs them their life. Men die 5.2 years earlier than women, a major cause being stress-related illnesses such as heart attack and stroke.

True, the occasional old boy still unfairly promotes a man over a woman, but despite unemployment being higher for men than women, today, "Sisters help Sisters" is not denigrated let alone sued as sexist, but encouraged. For example, Madeleine Albright said, "I have always said, there is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women." And such statements have broad impact. For example, Google that quote and you'll see 43,000 references to it.

Men's efforts to organize into groups have largely been ridiculed, for example, portraying men's groups as troglodytes tromping into the woods to beat tom-toms. And men's organizations have been pressured to admit women, for example, the service clubs: Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions. Further limiting men's ability to organize, men's groups don't get the enormous free advertising the media gives to women's groups.

Making it more likely that the next generation of men will do poorly compared with women, the aforementioned women's advocacy groups plus others such as Girls Inc. and Soropotimists, have instituted Take your Daughter to Work Day in many more workplaces than Take your Son and Daughter to Work Day. A Google search is not comprehensive here, but it gives you a good indication of cultural emphasis: "Take Your Daughter to Work Day" revealed 570,000 links. A search on "Take Your Daughter and Son to Work Day" yielded only 14,000, and "Take your Son and Daughter to Work Day," 6,000.

The media influences how men and women are treated, and how boys perceive themselves relative to girls. Whether in commercials, sitcoms, or movies, even in non-fictional media, men are disproportionately characterized as sleazebags or doofuses shown the way by wise women. Don't believe it? Just turn on your TV. And have you not seen "Girls Rule" tee shirts? How do you think that makes boys feel?

When I started as a career counselor 25 years ago, my male and female clients seemed equally optimistic about their future. Now, the females mostly feel that their world is their oyster and the males more often feel depressed and/or angry. As you know, so many young men are often back living with their parents, often stoned and/or playing shoot-em-up video games, while the young women are launching their career.

Yet ironically, America is making yet more efforts to exacerbate the anti-male sexism in our economy. Last year, President Obama created a well-funded Council on Women and Girls but rejected one on men and boys. Here is that rejected proposal. (Bias alert: I am a member of the commission that created that proposal.) And in Obama's April 6, 2012 speech at the White House Forum on Women and the Economy, he reiterated that he wants to focus yet more on women: "(I) look forward to continuing the important work we are doing to promote the interests of women." After all, women earn 77 cents on the dollar.
____

*Updated: This originally read "Family and Marriage Leave Act."

Are women discriminated against in the workplace? Looking at the data, women on average earn an annual wage that is approximately 75% that of men, which many people believe is the result of discrimination. However, when Prof. Steve Horwitz analyzes the data more closely, he finds that women make certain choices, such as career selection and raising children, which tend to result in lower wages than men. These choices could be the result of personal preferences or sexist cultural expectations for women's work, though the relative influence of these two factors remains unclear.

More Information:

Cities Where Women Outearn Male Counterparts: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2010/09/01/cities-where-women-outearn-male-cou...

An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women: http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf

Diana Furchtgott-Roth's testimony before the Joint Economic Committee in 2010: http://jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=2a1f8ad4-f64...

ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE

A contestant on "The Apprentice Los Angeles" is the latest to promote a story about the horrors of working for women. But research shows women don't actually hold one another back; when they become senior managers, women's salaries rise.

(WOMENSENEWS)--Jenn Hoffman believes that, sometimes, working for other women ought to be avoided.

The 27-year-old reality TV contestant believes some women unconsciously construct a "pink ceiling" in workplaces, which holds all women back.

"It seems to be almost a sport among women," said Hoffman, a former contestant on "The Apprentice Los Angeles" who was fired from the show by New York real estate magnate and host Donald Trump on March 4. "Women can become very aggressive and judgmental about your weight, your hair, your dress, whether you have the latest Prada bag. Battle lines are drawn between who is friends with who and your friendships directly affect which projects you work on. Now I think women are holding back other women more than the old boys' club mentality."

Hoffman has been using the spillover media attention from her "Apprentice" participation to promote the idea of the pink ceiling. Her public relations firm has contacted press and she hopes to speak on college campuses and in workplaces to warn women against the dangers of building pink ceilings.

Hoffman said working on a team dominated by women on the television show--who competed against another team with a member of the losing team fired by Trump at the end of each episode--made it difficult for any of the women to succeed because of female infighting.

In her off-screen life, Hoffman works for Orca Communications, a female-dominated public relations firm in Phoenix in which the publicists work from home "to curtail the water-cooler gossip."

The idea of the malevolent female manager--and the toxic female-dominated work environment--is riding a pop-culture wave.

Hoffman's pink-ceiling charges come on the heels of "The Devil Wears Prada," the 2003 book and 2006 film chronicling a young woman's first job as an assistant to a cruel and demeaning female fashion magazine editor, and arrive ahead of the September debut of the movie "The Nanny Diaries," based upon the 2002 book about an upper-class couple's maltreatment of their child's female nanny, in which the mother is a particularly nasty employer.