During the last presidential campaign there was much mentioned about the War on Women. What is the truth on this subject? Most certainly on the international stage, in many countries women are treated like chattels. In Muslim countries where Shariah Law dominates, a woman who is raped can be put to death, while her perpetrator goes free. This is a the true war on women.
But what about in modern western countries? Some would argue that in the United States, because of a pay gap between the genders, that women are being discriminated against. Statistics seem to bear this out. Economists determine this by charting plot lines by a method called "multivariate ordinary least squares regression," in which a computer essentially runs a line through a cloud of data points. When the computer run compares men vs women, women clearly earn less. But before we run to conclusions based on raw data, let's look deeper into the stats. First, the pay gap has declined substantially over the years. Before industrialization, the pay gap was around 70%. By the 1970s the gap had dropped to 40%. In 2007 it was 19%.
Today, 60% of the college graduates are women in the US. It is similar in other advanced countries. If the woman has the right college degree, employers most definately want to tap into that resource. Among the jobs where women with college degrees earn at least as much as men are computer engineer, petroleum engineer (and a variety of other engineering occupations), journalist, portfolio manager, and medical technologist. But in most of these fields, especially engineering, there are far fewer women than men. But over time, even in fields like engineering, statisically a woman will earn less. Why?! The answer can be summed up in one word....childrearing. The following needs to be emphasised. For every year a woman delays having her first child, her lifetime earnings will rise by 10%. By the same token, among college educated, never-married women with no children who worked full-time and were from 40 - 64 years old (that is, beyond child-bearing years), men averaged $40,000 a year while women averaged $47,000. It should be no surprise that if a woman takes a few years off to raise a child, that this is going to interrupt her climb to the top, and skew the data.
The upshot is that, indeed, the war on women does not exists....at least in this country. The reader would be wise to add the economic filter to anything coming from a politician's mouth.
