The NJ ‘gender wage gap’ is a lie (Opinion)

When New Jersey legislators passed the amazingly misguided law that prohibits employers from asking potential employees about their salary history, they did it based on a false premise. Supposedly, this law is meant to combat “gender inequality” and promote “equal pay for women” in New Jersey, which the increasingly out-of-touch Lt. Governor Sheila Oliver called a "discriminatory practice."

If you do your research about gender inequality in pay, you’ll find out why it exists. Mostly, it’s because women just don’t want to do a lot of the jobs that men do. And the ones that they do choose are mostly less lucrative. The numbers in the so-called pay disparity have to do with occupational differences and the choices that women make.

John Phelan, citing a Harvard Study, explains it much more eloquently than I ever could in this article called "Harvard Study: 'Gender Wage Gap' Explained Entirely by Work Choices of Men and Women." Women make the choice, in many cases, to stay home full-time mom’s raise kids or even if they decide to be part time workers, work less hours than men. But when the numbers are computed, they’re reported in a way that makes it seem like men are making more for the same amount of work. It’s just not true.

The fact is that the types of work men and women do can pay differently as well. For instance, some industries attract an overwhelmingly large number of women. If teachers, (only a moderately paying job) are mostly women, and engineers, (a significantly larger paycheck) are mostly men, this can explain the salary dichotomy. But those are choices people make. Read past page one of Google when you are looking at these gender pay studies and you will see you’re being duped by the fuzzy math and the glaring omissions of the facts that tell the whole story. There are more to these numbers than meets the eye and I am simply tired of the false narrative being presented. You should be too.

More from New Jersey 101.5:

​