While the rest of us were ordered to stay home during the COVID-19 crisis, essential employees are out, keeping the country running. Many of these jobs happen to fall in industries dominated by men, which should be irrelevant to the crisis at-hand. What matters is getting the job done. However, when Leftist groups attempt to pit men and women against each other by claiming women are victims of a “gender pay gap,” it’s important to point out that men and women choose different jobs that accordingly, have different pay.
Equal Pay Day is a faux holiday created by activists to signify how far into the year women have to work in order to catch up with their male counterparts from the previous year. However, the current crisis makes clear that not all jobs are created equal, and neither is their pay. Some are more essential, some are more risky, and in order to attract talent, some require higher pay.
Men, for example, account for 96% of all firefighters, 85% of police officers, 85% of the military, and 82% of the National Reserve and Guard. Men also account for more than 90% of truck drivers, pilots, railroad conductors, electricians, lineworkers, and plumbers. These are only a few of the male-dominated professions who are continuing their work through the coronavirus pandemic.
Of course, there are life-saving, essential professions dominated by women, too. 91% of nurses, for example, are women. But historically, men far outweigh women when it comes to riskier professions. In 2018, men represented an ashtonishing 92.5% of all workplace deaths. Quite simply, there’s no “equality” between the sexes here.
Women tend to choose safer and more flexible work conditions. They don’t choose to be truck drivers, electrical workers, nuclear plant operators, and farmers at high numbers. This is not to say that discrimination does not exist. Sadly, women do sometimes still face discrimination in the workplace, even though this is illegal. But the wage gap is not a good metric of discrimination because it does not take job-related factors such as risk into account. When factors such as education, occupation, experience, hours, and yes, risk, are accounted for, nearly any “gender pay gap” disappears.
Instead of peddling misleading statistics to pit men and women against each other as part of “Equal Pay Day,” we should thank everyone equally whose job requires them to take on enormous risk. These are people on the frontlines of the COVID-19 crisis, putting their community and country first. Whether that person is a man, or a woman, shouldn’t matter.