Calling All Fair Pay Warriors!

It’s an axiom of faith for the usual redistributionists that capitalists are biased against women and discriminate against them when it comes to pay and benefits. Cited as evidence is a “wage gap” that is never adjusted for age, experience, or time worked. Even today women are more likely to take time off in the home. That’s an admirable decision, but it naturally results in lower pay in workplaces that value experience.

The even more bizarre manifestation of the “pay discrimination” thesis was comparable worth. The claim was that women workers, such as librarians, were paid less than men workers, such as truck drivers, even though the work was “comparable.” Of course, there was no obvious definition of what was “comparable,” so highly paid consultants were called in to decide exactly how many nurses equaled how many engineers. No one agreed on who was equal to what, and the whole enterprise died an ignominious death.

Still, activists routinely charge that the market is unfair to women. Now comes a study finding that, er, women earn more than men in several large cities. Oops! Reports the New York Times:

Young women in New York and several of the nation’s other largest cities who work full time have forged ahead of men in wages, according to an analysis of recent census data.

The shift has occurred in New York since 2000 and even earlier in Los Angeles, Dallas and a few other cities.

Economists consider it striking because the wage gap between men and women nationally has narrowed more slowly and has even widened in recent years among one part of that group: college-educated women in their 20s. But in New York, young college-educated women’s wages as a percentage of men’s rose slightly between 2000 and 2005.

The analysis was prepared by Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College, who first reported his findings in Gotham Gazette, published online by the Citizens Union Foundation. It shows that women of all educational levels from 21 to 30 living in New York City and working full time made 117 percent of men’s wages, and even more in Dallas, 120 percent. Nationwide, that group of women made much less: 89 percent of the average full-time pay for men.

There’s a logical explanation for this — women are now graduating in greater numbers than men and are gravitating to the large cities. But who cares about the facts! Where are the lawyers, bureaucrats, and politicians when men need them?