Morning Must-Read: Daniel Kuehn: Botched Economics of Gender by Mark Perry and Andrew Biggs in the WSJ

Daniel Kuehn: Botched Economics of Gender by Mark Perry and Andrew Biggs in the WSJ: “Mark Perry and Andrew Biggs have a really unfortunate…

…op-ed in the Wall Street Journal yesterday perpetuating the idea that the gender pay gap is a ‘myth’…. Why[?]… Because surprise, surprise the conditional difference in means is smaller than the unconditional difference in means! I sent this letter to the editor in. It has not been published at this point:

Mark Perry and Andrew Biggs (April 7th, 2014, “The ’77 Cents on the Dollar’ Myth About Women’s Pay”) seem to confuse our ability to attribute the gender pay gap to various factors with the idea that the gap itself is a ‘myth’…. By highlighting the various determinants of pay disparities Perry and Biggs are actually confirming the existence of the gap and presenting evidence on where it originates…. We know… that many occupations are highly segregated by gender, and that large gender disparities exist in the amount of time dedicated to household work. Young women may be nominally free to major in whatever they choose, as Perry and Biggs suggest, but these choices are heavily conditioned by earlier experiences in the home and in primary and secondary school. All of these disparities are closely related to each other and to the pay gap, and they pose a real problem for those of us that value gender equity. Dismissing the gender pay disparity because it is deeply embedded with other disparities does not clarify the issue at all; it confuses the issue.