Or, in the case of Barry and the boys, the use of already debunked lies. Barry seems to think that harping on a wage gap between men and women will help Democrats in the midterm elections. Weird position, considering that even liberal "news" bastion CNN concedes that Barry's White House
has a problem in this area. Other media outlets were e
ven more critical in reporting the White House's failures in an area Barry seems determined to make a midterm campaign centerpiece:
When the White House announced this week that the president had signed executive orders beefing up efforts to fight pay disparity between men and women, the president's men were caught flat-footed when a skeptical press challenged both the 77 cents on the dollar meme and the White House's own 88 cents of the dollar reality.
“Today, the average full-time working woman earns just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns…in 2014," said President Obama at the White House on Tuesday. "That’s an embarrassment. It is wrong.”
But the White House was promptly embarrassed by having to defend its own wage gap. Women at the White House earn just 88 cents on the dollar of a man's earnings. White House spokesman Jay Carney acknowledged this, but he argued that when you control for key differences the gap disappears.
"What I can tell you is that we, as an institution here, have aggressively addressed this challenge, and obviously, though, at the 88 cents that you cite, that is not a hundred, but it is better than the national average," Carney said. "And when it comes to the bottom line that women who do the same work as men have to be paid the same, there is no question that that is happening here at the White House at every level."
But critics were quick to point out that controlling for differences is precisely what the 77 cents on the dollar figure fails to do, and why it is, in fact, misleading. The Washington Post's fact checker Glenn Kessler promptly awarded the president two Pinocchios for the statement because the 77 number accounts for nothing, even though men and women take vastly different career paths.
This kind of amateurish inaccuracy has been a consistent feature of this White House since January 2009. They don't care what the truth is, they care what they believe. Look at this equal pay crap. Just as a starting point, the numbers themselves are simply
long-discredited horseshit:
First of all, if you actually do the math on weekly earnings, the 77 cent number is just outdated. Women who worked “full time” in 2013, according to easily retrievable BLS data, made 82 cents (not 77 cents) for every dollar earned by men working full time ($706 per week versus $860).
But this is also an inapt comparison, because “full time” includes people working as few as 35 hours a week and as many as…well, as many hours as one can work in a week. Surely, we shouldn’t assume discrimination at work (and discrimination laws are the answer) if some or all the pay gap is the result of differences in hours worked. Again, according to BLS data, the average woman working full time works 94 percent as many hours as the average man working full-time. (The “hour gap” gets slightly larger if you only consider, say, workers over 25.) Once you account for the “hour gap,” full-time working women make 87 percent of what men make for the same amount of work.
For what’s left of the gap, before we assume employers are deliberately paying women less because they’re evil, we should factor in other things that put women at a disadvantage. To name just two that various legitimate studies incorporate, there are career interruptions (mothers are far more likely to suffer these than fathers) and then occupational/educational choices. If women are less likely to choose the most lucrative college majors (they are), or more likely to leave the workforce for a time to raise children (also true), they’ll end up making less money than male counterparts who don’t do those things, even if employers don’t discriminate at all.
Even the White House had to admit the numbers Barry is citing as Gospel
could not actually be defended. This, of course, is a result of the fact that
even government studies debunk the numbers the White House insists upon using:
There are observable differences in the attributes of men and women that account for most of the wage gap. Statistical analysis that includes those variables has produced results that collectively account for between 65.1 and 76.4 percent of a raw gender wage gap of 20.4 percent, and thereby leave an adjusted gender wage gap that is between 4.8 and 7.1 percent. These variables include:
A greater percentage of women than men tend to work part-time. Part-time work tends to pay less than full-time work.
A greater percentage of women than men tend to leave the labor force for child birth, child care and elder care. Some of the wage gap is explained by the percentage of women who were not in the labor force during previous years, the age of women, and the number of children in the home.
Women, especially working mothers, tend to value “family friendly” workplace policies more than men. Some of the wage gap is explained by industry and occupation, particularly, the percentage of women who work in the industry and occupation.
Research also suggests that differences not incorporated into the model due to data limitations may account for part of the remaining gap. Specifically, CONSAD’s model and much of the literature, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics Highlights of Women’s Earnings, focus on
wages rather than total compensation. Research indicates that women may value non-wage
benefits more than men do, and as a result prefer to take a greater portion of their compensation in the form of health insurance and other fringe benefits.
And still Barry and his boys use horseshit numbers. Is there any reason to believe them on anything?
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