NBC reports that the Pope has denounced the so-called wage gap:
“Why is it taken for granted that women must earn less than men? No! They have the same rights. The discrepancy is a pure scandal,” he told tens of thousands of people at his general audience in St. Peter’s Square.
Raising his voice for emphasis as he made some of his most forceful remarks on the subject to date, he said Christians should “decisively support the right to equal pay for equal work.”
And yet, the actual economic data (e.g., not the bullet points the Pope reads) does suggest that people with similar worker productivity earn similar wages. The reason for the gender gap, however, is the fact that women and men, taken as a group, tend to have very different work histories, and thus, different levels of worker productivity. Moreover, women tend to pursue careers with lower worker productivity (such as fields in the humanities, education, and social services) and a greater degree of physical safety while men tend to pursue jobs with higher productivity (such as engineering) and which are less physically safe (such as construction work).
Nevertheless, when we parse the data, we find the single women actually earn more than single men, which reminds us that women, as a group “earn less” because married women or women with children tend to have larger gaps in their work histories, and thus tend to be less up-to-date in their fields, or have fewer years of experience.
For more on this, see:
What’s Behind the Gender Wage Gap By Andrew Syrios
Is the Market Racist and Sexist: The Wage Gap and the Glass Ceiling By Walter Block
Employers Do Not Systematically and Persistently Pay Women Less than Men for Equally Valuable Work By Robert Higgs
Wage Gaps, Inequality, and Government By William Anderson
