Equal Pay Day

Today I'm talking a break from health-related stuff. You may have heard that today is Equal Pay Day. Since some interpretations of the data conclude that women earn $0.77 of every dollar that men earn for equal work, today represents how much extra women must work to earn as much as men earned in 2015. 

In honor of Equal Pay Day I'm suggesting you listen to this Freakonomics interview: "The True Story of the Gender Pay Gap" with Harvard economics professor Claudia Goldin. Professor Goldin studies the female labor force and income inequality so hearing her talk and explain this politically charged topic is eye opening. 

Here's an excerpt to get you interested:

Well, it is true that if you took individuals in the labor force and took those who were working full-time, full-year, and took all women, took the median annual earnings of those women and took the same thing for men, and divided the two, it would be .77 or around that, OK?  And that’s a number that has increased. In early 1970’s it was .59 and there was a mantra, “59 cents on a dollar, that’s not enough, OK?  We are equal to men, we deserve more.”  So, is this for equal work?  Is it equal individuals?  What economists do is they use data to figure out whether the individuals are the same; they try to make them comparable as possible; they squeeze out these differences and productive attributes; they look for individuals who have the same education, the same labor-force participation rates over their life cycle, etc.  And they squeeze those out and we still get a number that’s less than one. So, does that mean that women are receiving lower pay for equal work?  That is possibly the case in certain places, but by and large, it’s not that. It’s something else.