Thursday, January 30, 2014

Obama's "77 Cents on the Dollar" Claim Debunked

Obama's "77 Cents on the Dollar" Claim Debunked | The American Spectator:
 "Rosin wrote:
The official Bureau of Labor Department statistics show that the median earnings of full-time female workers is 77 percent of the median earnings of full-time male workers. But that is very different than “77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.”

The statistic does not mean that the female factory worker standing next to a male factory worker is only making $7.25 an hour while he makes $8.02:

Women congregate in different professions than men do, and the largely male professions tend to be higher-paying. If you account for those differences, and then compare a woman and a man doing the same job, the pay gap narrows to 91 percent. So, you could accurately say in that Obama ad that, “women get paid 91 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.”

Many men tend to go into science and engineering fields which generally pay more. Women who stay at home with children are factored in as earning nothing. Therefore, the 77 cent stat is a misleading one."

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