A Recruiter Explains: Pay Inequality Affects Men and Women Equally

Supply and demand play a much larger role than institutionalized bias

Hot on the heels of our national celebrations of Ferret Day on April 2 and Tweed Day yesterday, comes today’s recognition of Equal Pay Day. Today’s holiday was concocted to call attention to the tendentiously derived statistic that women earn only about 80 percent as much as men.

This is not to say that the statistic isn’t accurate—only that it does not tell the whole story. If you add up all the dollars earned by women and all the dollars earned by men and divide by the number of hours worked by each, women do, on average, earn about 80 percent of what men earn. But using that fact alone to infer that there is some gender-based bias at work is to overlook a variety of other relevant factors. As Bill O’Neil, my old business professor at Villanova, was fond of saying, “That’s utilizing statistics the way a drunk uses a lamp post: For support rather than illumination.”

Virtually all of the difference in pay between men and women can be explained by the choices that each make. Generally speaking, men tend to choose. . .

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