A Letter to Washington Post Columnist Julianne McShane About Columns on the “Gender Pay Gap”
Dear Ms. McShane,
I respectfully ask that you take the time to read this admittedly long letter in its entirety and to thoughtfully consider what I say here.
As a lifelong reader of the Washington Post, I’ve long noticed that the Post has a clear gender bias. This bias is self-evident: the Post has a gender columnist who only champions the female perspective, and in 2018 it published a repulsive article, Why Can’t We Hate Men? Unbelievably, despite an overwhelmingly negative response from thousands of posted comments, at year-end the article was still selected as one of The Post’s favorite op-eds of 2018!
I’m writing to Post columnists to get them to recognize and to correct this gender bias, this gender prejudice.
Your recent articles in the Post about female doctors earning $2 million less than their male counterparts over their careers and a proposed New York city law requiring employers to include salary in job postings, as well as The Lily site¹ that sponsored them are all additional examples of this bias.
Before I continue, please know that I’ve had exemplary female doctors and I’ve always appreciated and marveled at the dedication and caring commitment of both them and the numerous female nurses who have helped provide my medical care.
And it must be added that their perseverance in the face of the covid-19 pandemic has been amazing. They all deserve to be paid handsomely.
But with that said, your articles, like many thousands of others published in the past 40 or more years that assert the existence of a “gender pay gap” promote a destructive deceit that are themselves part of the problem because they generate in women a mindset of victimization — that they are victims of gender-based pay discrimination — instead of addressing the major reason for the difference in pay between men and women: the choices women themselves make.
This fact is explained in a well-researched book by Warren Farrell, a former board member of the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women. His book, Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap — and What Women Can Do About It, provides a detailed analysis and thorough explanation about the real reasons for the pay gap. Farrell thoroughly documents how much of the difference is caused by the choices that women make:
“…bias-based unequal pay for women is largely a myth, and that women are most often paid less than men not because they are discriminated against, but because they have made lifestyle choices that affect their ability to earn. … [and] while discrimination sometimes plays a part², both men and women unconsciously make trade-offs that affect how much they earn [emphasis added].”
The book’s conclusion is also supported by the U.S. federal government! In 2009 the Department of Labor published a report, An Analysis of the Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women — Final Report ³ that concluded:
“Although additional research in this area is clearly needed, this study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers [bold emphases added].”
Specific to your article about female doctors earning less, Ferrell, while teaching at a medical school, noticed that his female students were choosing specializations which made fewer demands on these future doctors but that were “lower-pay choices” that emphasized fulfillment and flexibility:
“It was apparent to me that by the end of the first year of medical school, both sexes knew that, for example, surgery would require about twice as many hours of work per week and more training, but paid more than child psychiatry [a female dominated specialization]. Yet every field of surgery was systematically avoided by women, as was anything to do with death or dying [emphasis added]. For example, nationwide, men are 11 times more likely to become thoracic (chest) surgeons, 8 times more likely to be urological surgeons, and 9 times more likely to be orthopedic surgeons.”
Farrell also observed that studies like the one referenced in your article cause women to focus on their victimization instead of how to increase their respective earnings:
“…headlines saying “Male Doctors Earn More Than Female Doctors” encourage women to focus their binoculars on victimization rather than on the subfields that lead to women earning as much or more than their male counterparts [emphasis added] … And, as we can see in Table 11 [labeled “Physicians: Specialties in Which Women Under 45 Earn the Same or More Than Their Male Counterparts”], female physicians also earn more than men when [multiple named subfields] are aggregated (averaged).”
A former director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 1983 to 1985, Linda Chavez, agreed with the book’s message of empowerment vs. victimhood:
“If you’re a woman who thinks she’s underpaid, quit complaining and do something about it. Dr. Farrell’s message — one of empowerment, not victimhood — is must reading for any woman who wants to enhance earning power and help close the earnings gap.” ⁴
So, who’s right? Dr. Ferrell, Ms. Chavez, the federal government, and thousands of others who dispute the existence or significance of a gender pay gap (Googling ”gender pay gap debunked” returned more than 5,200 results) or the hundreds of studies and thousands of articles like yours that assert its existence?
Part of the answer lies in how statistics are used to describe the purported pay gap. At best, these statistics are a calculated misrepresentation of basic facts; at worst, they represent a bald-faced lie, a feminist-generated fiction that proves the adage that “figures don’t lie, but liars figure”.
An example that clearly illustrates this misrepresentation can be found on the State of the Gender Pay Gap in 2021 web page of the salary compensation company, PayScale. This page presents information about two wage gaps!
· An “uncontrolled gender pay gap that takes the ratio of the median earnings of women to men without controlling for various compensable factors … In 2021, women make only $0.82 for every dollar a man makes…”.
This is the misleading wage gap that we’ve all been led to believe is true.
· A “controlled gender pay gap that controls for job title, years of experience, education, industry, location, and other compensable factors, measures equal pay for equal work. … Women in the controlled group make $0.98 for every $1.00 a man makes.”
THIS IS THE STATISTICALLY INSIGNIFICANT WAGE GAP THAT FEMINISTS WANT TO PRETEND DOESN’T EXIST.
The aforementioned 2009 Department of Labor study also made note of this misrepresentation of statistics:
“… the raw wage gap [between men and women] continues to be used in misleading ways [emphasis added] to advance public policy agendas without fully explaining the reasons behind the gap.”
Isn’t the phrase “used in misleading ways” just a polite way of saying “they’re lying”?
The other part of the answer as to whether a gender pay gap exists lies in an observation made by Ferrell about a survey he used as a source of data, the “Survey of Young Physicians”. He notes that two iterations of the survey between 1987 and 1991 showed a trend of increased compensation for female doctors.
However, he also noticed that the pay data is no longer captured by this survey:
“Why hasn’t the Survey of Young Physicians’ gender data been updated? Well, no one will say for sure, but a pattern emerging from my research is that each time a study discovers there is no pay gap, that portion of the study is not repeated. That is, the portion measuring the pay differences based on gender is dropped from the next study. Or the study itself is dropped or fundamentally changed. That’s what happened with the Survey of Young Physicians’ gender data.”
Or, to borrow a line from Simon and Garfunkel’s song The Boxer, “Still, feminists hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest.”
The pay gap myth is so powerfully entrenched in our national discourse, and women have become so convinced that they’re paid less than men, they blind themselves to inconvenient facts that often prove completely otherwise.
A mind-blowing example is Megan Rapinoe and the U.S. women’s soccer team, who have long complained and have filed lawsuits claiming that they’re victims of the pay gap, while completely ignoring that they actually earn more than the men’s team! According to this article,
“…the Women’s National Team earned approximately $24 million overall; the Men’s National Team earned only $18 million. The average take per game was $220,747 for the women’s team, compared to $212,639 for the men’s team. And while the individual female plaintiffs made an average of $11,356 to $17,416 per game, the four highest-paid male players made an average of $10,360 to $13,964 per game…. But don’t let Megan Rapinoe fool you: A victim of sex discrimination, she is not.” ⁵
A second example is in the modeling industry, where women make more — much more! — than men. According to this Time article,
“The [modeling] industry’s pay gap has been documented before, with Fortune reporting that the top female models bring home millions more dollars than men. For instance, Gisele Bündchen, the highest earning female model, brought home $42 million in 2013, per Forbes, while the top earning male model, Sean O’Pry, only took home $1.5 million that year.”
So, the top female model takes home a whopping $40.5 MILLION more than the top male model. This is 28 times as much!
Why aren’t women complaining about this wage gap?
Your article about New York City’s new “pay transparency bill” offers a third example, if not of being blinded by inconvenient facts, then at least ignoring them. You write that the bill’s author, Helen Rosenthal, claims that in the late 1980’s she was paid $5,000 less than a man “with the same title as her”, but you (and she) don’t provide any relevant details⁶ that might reasonably explain the difference or even its significance: we obviously need to know what their respective salaries were to determine the extent of the claimed difference.
For example, if their salaries were — for purposes of illustration — $10,000 (hers) and $15,000 (his) the gap would have been 50% of her salary. This is entirely different than if their salaries were $100,000 and $105,000, where the gap would only have been 5% of her salary. And as explained next, this modest difference could well be due to other factors.
Even assuming that Rosenthal was both honest and accurate about the difference, were there any mitigating circumstances that caused this difference? Your article doesn’t say. She was new to the job; had the man been there longer, perhaps considerably so? Were the responsibilities the same? Was the “same title” they both shared generalized, filled by many different people with different pay grades, e.g., “Accountant” vs. “Chief Financial Officer”? And that HR increased her salary might not be proof of discrimination but rather due to bureaucratic expediency. (For a similar story see my letter to the Post’s Work Advice Columnist Karla L. Miller.)
Ms. McShane, I can only hope that you’ve read this far. If so, I thank you. I pray that I’ve opened your mind to a fuller, more balanced, and fairer understanding of the reasons underlying the gender pay gap that you so passionately write about.
If I have, please help to set the record straight. You could start by reading Dr. Ferrell’s book and then writing a column that admits the truth about the myth of the pay gap.
And one that helps women change their mindset from “wage victims” to “empowered earners”.
Do you have the courage to write such a column?
Closing note: Ms. McShane never replied to my letter to her or wrote the suggested column.
For other letters to Post columnists see my Letters to The Washington Post list:
FOOTNOTES:
1. The Lily is “A product of The Washington Post, … a destination for stories central to the everyday lives of millennial women.” It’s not that I object to women-oriented publications. Rather, it’s the site’s feminist-inspired slant, and the resulting anti-male bias represented in many of the site’s articles that is objectionable. A recent example is an article by Janay Kingsberry, U.S. women are largely dissatisfied with how they’re treated. Most men don’t see a problem, which complains about how women are mistreated without noticing that men are treated far worse. It appears that Kingsberry is completely unaware of the gender empathy gap, “… the striking and disturbing indifference of our culture to the suffering of men and boys in stark contrast to our evident concern for the suffering of girls and women.” [men’s rights activist Janice Fiamengo]. The Lily site serves as more evidence of the Post’s feminist-inspired bias: the National Organization for Women could have sponsored it as much as the Post.
2. For example, see discussion later in this letter about the modeling industry paying women much more than men.
3. The link to the actual “wages disparity” report seems to work only sporadically. The link provided above is to an article about the report; the direct link to the report is here.
4. From list of the book’s endorsers on back cover.
5. Also, Rapinoe and the women’s soccer team were potentially paid less because the team deliberately chose a different pay structure
6. A brief Google search to find details on Rosenthal’s claim only found the same description on her Twitter feed; no details could be found
By Stephen Bond on October 14, 2022.
Exported from Medium on February 28, 2023.