Hadley Heath Manning joins the podcast to discuss this month’s policy focus: “Equal Pay Every Day” — about the faux holiday that left-leaning feminist activists celebrate each year. We discuss why the wage-gap argument overlooks so many factors, including the various personal and professional choices women make. In other words, we explore why the wage gap is not a metric of “equal pay for equal work.”
Hadley Heath Manning is director of policy at Independent Women’s Forum and Independent Women’s Voice and a Senior Blankley Fellow at the Steamboat Institute. Hadley has testified before Congress and state legislatures on various policy issues. She also appears frequently in radio and TV outlets across the country and is a regular guest on the Fox Business Network. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, POLITICO, and many others.
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg, and on today’s episode, it’s our monthly policy focus. This month, the month of March, we are exploring what is known as Equal Pay Day, the faux holiday that left-leaning feminist activists love to celebrate each year. We’ll get into why their wage gap argument overlooks so many factors such as the various choices women make. In other words, we’re going to break down why the wage gap is not a metric of equal pay for equal work.
And the person with us today to break it all down is the author of this policy focus, Hadley Heath Manning. Hadley Heath Manning is the Director of Policy at Independent Women’s Forum and Independent Women’s Voice. And she’s also a Senior Blankley Fellow at the Steamboat Institute. She has testified before Congress and state legislatures on various policy issues. She also appears frequently in radio and TV outlets across the country. Hadley, always a pleasure to have you on She Thinks.
Hadley Heath Manning:
It’s always a pleasure to be with you. Hi, Beverly.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, this is a busy month. We know it’s Women’s History Month. We also know it’s the Equal Pay Day month. And so the policy focus focuses on this. And just so our listeners know, the policy focus name is “Equal Pay Every Day.” You can find that at iwf.org, but I thought we would just start with the basic question of the wage gap. What is it, and does it exist?
Hadley Heath Manning:
Yeah. Well, it does exist. It just may not be what you think it is, depending on what you think it is, right? We like to say that the wage gap statistic is meaningless, but actually in this policy focus, I wrote that it’s worse than meaningless. It’s misleading, particularly when people are presented with the raw wage gap without context. So the raw wage gap is a statistic produced regularly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They take all full-time working men and all full-time working women, they average the pay that those two groups of people are making, and they compare the averages. And they don’t, for example, look into which professions or level of education or seniority or how many hours worked or working conditions that those two groups might have, but they looked specifically at pay and they found that women are making 82% of what men are making in the latest iteration of the wage gap. So, that’s what it is. We can talk more about what it means, but I think it’s also important to talk about what it does not mean.
Beverly Hallberg:
Yeah. What it does not mean. Let’s get into why there is a wage gap to begin with. If some people hear that number that you just gave us, they would say, well, that is obvious discrimination, that there is a disparity in pay, but you lay out in the policy focus some reasons as to why there is this gap.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Right. We like to talk about the factors, maybe confounding factors. There are reasons that men and women are different and they often make different choices. They also, some of the factors, I think choice, such a strong word, but there are so many factors that influence the way men and women structure their lives. And this starts pretty early on. We looked into, for example, college majors, or whether or not men and women are going to college. Interestingly, women are actually going to college more now than men. This wasn’t the case generations ago, and so if you look at maybe some of the top earners in our economy today, you might find more men because back in the day more men went to college and more men got higher degrees, but if you look at recent graduated classes, you’ll see that women actually get the majority of college degrees, master’s degrees, Ph.D.’s.
And that’s certainly been a part of closing the wage gap, but you also have to break it down more specifically than what level of degree or what percentage of those degrees go to women. You have to look at what are they degrees in? What are men and women studying? And it’s still the case that men are more likely to study fields that result in professions or jobs in more lucrative fields. So I’m talking about engineering or technology versus women who are more drawn to the social sector. They like services. They like education, being a healthcare aid, working with people. I think that might have something to do with the fact that women are just more relational than men. That’s a broad brush that I’m painting with.
But I think it also has to do with the way that men and women are thinking ahead to structuring their lives. When they become mothers and fathers, then we see an even wider wage gap. And this has to do, of course, with men and women across different fields and across different professions, making choices, maybe to lean in, if you’re a working father, you want to be the breadwinner. You want to earn more money and provide for these children that you fathered. Or, if you’re a mom, you’re more likely to lean out and say, “someone’s got to get Johnny to school. Somebody’s got to get Sally to swim practice. I want to be there. I want to be there when I have a baby.” Maybe you’re breastfeeding or maybe you’re taking a longer time out of the workforce. All of these factors contribute to the fact that on average men earn more money than women. And I don’t think that all of that is bad news. I think it’s often just reflective of the individual choices that people and families want to make.
Beverly Hallberg:
And do you think one of the reasons why these factors, these various factors, including, like you were just saying, the different careers people get into, the choices people make once they get married and start having kids, is that, in society today, it is a faux pas to talk about the differences between men and women? And do you think that that is factoring into this as well, as we can’t say in a politically correct environment, in a woke environment, that men and women generally are different and generally — this is a broad stroke — but have different interests than each other?
Hadley Heath Manning:
Yeah. I think the wage gap discussion is interesting, but it actually opens the door to what I think are much more interesting conversations about the nature of sex and gender, about whether these differences between men and women that we see in the economy are reflective of inherent differences between the sexes, or some more progressive feminists might argue that it’s not our biology that makes us different, but it is society’s expectations, and women and men are trying to live up to the gendered expectations of what it means to be a mom or a dad or a man or a woman. And I think that’s a much more fascinating conversation. I think surely nature and nurture shape every person in some way, but my concern, most of all, is are people happy? Are they doing the things that maximize their fulfillment and their happiness in life? And when you survey men and women, particularly working moms and working dads, you’ll find that for most working dads, they say, “Working full-time is my preference. That’s what I want.” And then when you look at working moms, it’s actually a much more interesting picture; more working moms say that part-time work would be their ideal. And so that, I think, is sort of representative that there is a piece of this that is preference, and where those preferences come from, probably a fascinating neuroscience discussion, but at least people seem to be making choices towards their preferences. And I think that’s good. I want people to be happy.
Beverly Hallberg:
And what I thought was interesting about the Equal Pay Day this year, which was March 15th, is that it’s the earliest that it has been in years, meaning — and when we talk about this day, what it means is this is how long women have to work, in theory, in order to make the same as men. So they have to work up to March 15th. So why do we see it so early, especially during the COVID pandemic, how did that impact the wage gap?
Hadley Heath Manning:
Yeah, I think this is really fascinating, and I think a great argument for why the wage gap is really just not a useful statistic. But feminists persist in celebrating Equal Pay Day, so we’ll persist in debunking it. But the issue with the COVID pandemic is that two factors really related to women’s employment. One is that because of what I mentioned earlier, that women like to work in social fields, social work or social services that can be provided across the economy, childcare, healthcare, a lot of these service-based industries suffered the most during COVID. Also, women tended to be in fields that were considered not essential when the initial shutdowns took place. Men are working a lot of times in the military, infrastructure, many of the so-called essential industries that kept running.
So we saw sort of a “she session.” Am I saying that right? — a “she session” related to COVID-19. But then, just as important and in some ways a more widely felt impact of the COVID pandemic was the closure of so many schools and the disruption of so many childcare arrangements that many working moms depend on. And so some women were kind of put in this very difficult choice between, do I stay home and help my child who might be struggling with virtual learning during the school closure, or do I continue to work? Do I hire someone to come help with my kid, even though that’s going to take away from my earnings? These were really tough choices for families during the pandemic.
But the bottom line is, many of the lower-paying jobs for women that we saw eliminated during the COVID-19 pandemic simply got removed from the wage gap data. So we’re changing the denominator of the wage gap effectively, and that contributed to the wage gap getting smaller. And typically we would say, well, if the wage gap’s getting smaller, that means men and women must be acting more alike, whether it’s men being more involved, dads at home, or women leaning into the workplace, Sheryl Sandberg style. But instead what this actually indicated was just a change in the people who were counted, because remember the wage gap statistic only takes full-time workers into account. It doesn’t account for labor force participation, doesn’t account for part-time workers. And so that’s a good argument, I think, for why we should just drop the wage gap statistic altogether. It doesn’t tell us much about how men and women are acting, or if they’re happy.
Beverly Hallberg:
And similar to measuring the unemployment number, because it does determine who is actively looking for work versus people who just stopped looking for work altogether.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Right.
Beverly Hallberg:
So there’s always a way to skew the numbers —
Hadley Heath Manning:
That’s right.
Beverly Hallberg:
— as we know in politics. And so with this, I want to get into whether or not there need to be even any legal protections for women. So you lay out very well the reasons why there is some disparity between what women make as a whole and what men make as a whole, largely based on choice, what women prefer, but yet there often are politicians who are saying that we need to have legal protections for women in the workplace. Are women already protected?
Hadley Heath Manning:
Yeah. So this is interesting. I’ll mention that, back when some legal protections around equal pay for equal work were being debated, there’s this famous YouTube clip — everybody should look it up — with Milton Friedman debating with a college woman who was talking about the wage gap. And what Milton Friedman pointed out about the wage gap was that he wanted sexist employers to be punished. So in other words, if I’m a sexist employer and I’m willing to pay a man $1 for every 75 cents that I might pay a woman, I’m paying a 25% penalty on my labor cost just to prefer a man who does equal work. And I think that’s a fascinating way to look at it, but around this time in the 1960s, 1963, we saw the passage of the Equal Pay Act. In 1964, we saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and Title VII of that law also protects equal pay for equal work. So people should be aware that discriminating against someone in the workplace, as I just described, paying a man more than a woman just because he is a man, that is illegal in the United States and it has been for decades. And if you or someone you know feels or sees and has evidence of pay discrimination taking place on the basis of sex, they should file a complaint with the HR Department or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. There are protections for women and women should take advantage of those.
Beverly Hallberg:
So are there any more policies that you think we need, or do you think that status quo is working?
Hadley Heath Manning:
Yeah. I mean, I think the wage gap is often presented as a problem that needs solving, right? And I think that’s the interesting part of this discussion is is there a problem here, or is this just reflective of people’s choices? Beyond the basic legal protections, we do see some bills and some proposals. Most often states or federal lawmakers will say “let’s get a commission together and let’s investigate the wage gap some more,” but we’ve investigated it at IWF many times and so have many other economists, only to find that so many of these explanatory factors more or less close the wage gap when you do the correction.
I will say that just because the wage gap is not a metric of discrimination doesn’t mean that discrimination doesn’t take place. Murder is also illegal, and sadly people still get murdered. The question that you asked, though, is are there additional protections needed? Some of the proposed legislation that would go beyond the basic guarantee of equal pay for equal work, the basic outlawing of wage-based discrimination, are things like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which President Obama signed into law as soon as he came into office. I believe it was the first bill that he signed into law. And then the proposed Paycheck Fairness Act, and these bills — one’s a bill, one’s a law — they’re kind of similar in that they focus on lawsuits and they focus on, in the case of Lilly Ledbetter, it expanded or extended the statute of limitations, so increasing the amount of time over which a woman who’s been discriminated against can file a lawsuit against a discriminatory employer.
The Paycheck Fairness Act would go even further. So the Paycheck Fairness Act basically would allow a trial lawyer to create a class-action lawsuit on behalf of a group of women, even if they didn’t file for one. They’d have to opt out of the class action rather than opting into it. So it’s a lot having to do with the way that these lawsuits are adjudicated. Also, it would put a burden of proof on employers to show that any statistical pay disparity between, say, the men working at their firm and the women working at their firm had to be related and explained by a business reason. And of course, that sounds like a good thing. We should always be able to explain on paper why we’re doing what we’re doing in a business, but this creates a paperwork and a legal burden for employers associated with employing and advancing women in the workplace.
And it also would punish employers who do have more flexibility in terms of, okay, John wants to come into the office five days a week, but Jamie only wants to come into the office four days a week. She wants to work from home on Fridays. So in exchange for that flexibility, I might offer her a lower salary. Okay, well, that’s not going to be allowed under the Paycheck Fairness Act, right, because it’s going to look like there’s some kind of discrimination taking place. So employers are basically going to respond by saying everyone’s pay is standardized. Everyone’s working conditions are standardized. There’s no more room for flexibility. And this is flexibility that women want. So, that’s one good reason not to pass that bill. It’s been introduced over and over again in Congress, in the U.S. Senate, and we continue to make the case for why it’s really not about paycheck fairness. So many bills are given these nice names, and it’s really not what it’s about.
Beverly Hallberg:
So final question for you: what does it mean to women when they believe this myth? And I just think about this even in terms of myself being a female business owner, some people will ask me, “What is it like being a female business owner?” I’m like, “Probably the same it is for a man. We have clients. We have to work really hard. We have to make payroll, all of those things.” But I wonder if women, then, feel like victims, what does that mean for them as they enter the workplace? I don’t feel like that is an empowering thing for women to feel. And even for men to feel.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Right.
Beverly Hallberg:
For men to feel like maybe they have an unfair advantage against women.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Right. Yeah. I think if you really believe that women are being systematically discriminated against in the workplace or in society in general, my fear is that women internalize that and that they come to expect that and that they come to believe that that is commonplace and that is normal. And almost as if that is acceptable, when of course, it’s anything but acceptable. It’s totally unacceptable to treat women that way. And so we need to be able to see…. For example, I had the same issue several years ago. There was a lot of discussion about rape culture and how rape is taking place everywhere on America’s college campuses. I had this fear that we were sending a message that women should expect to be treated this way. This is a part of our culture, that it’s a part of our society when it absolutely is not, absolutely should not be. And individual cases of discrimination, or rape for that matter, should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. And women should know that they have rights, that if they’re being mistreated, that’s illegal, it’s wrong. And not only does our legal system have their back, but our society has their back, and we believe that we should support each other and support every individual in the workplace.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, I so appreciate this policy focus because I do think it’s important to figure out why there is some pay disparity, and as you lay out in the policy focus, that a lot has to do with women’s choices and what they prefer and their work. So I encourage everybody to check it out, go to iwf.org. It is called Equal Pay Every Day. Hadley Heath Manning, thank you so much for working on this policy focus and also joining us on She Thinks.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Thanks, Beverly.
Beverly Hallberg:
And thank you all for joining us. Before you go, Independent Women’s Forum does want you to know that we rely on the generosity of supporters like you. An investment in IWF fuels our efforts to enhance freedom, opportunity, and wellbeing for all Americans. So please consider making a small donation to IWF by visiting iwf.org/donate. That is iwf.org/donate. Last, if you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks, do leave us a rating or a review; it does help. And we’d love it if you shared this episode so that your friends know where they can find more She Thinks. From all of us here at Independent Women’s Forum, thanks for watching.