Bradley+S’s+2018+OpEd+Article

If there's one thing that I really want to talk about more than anything else for this project, it'd definitely be about the gender pay gap. More specifically, how it's NOT what most people claim it to be. The common belief, as most people are probably already familiar with, is that women make, on average, $0.77 for every $1 a man earns. That claim is simply a gross misinterpretation of the actual statistic. As many sites have already reported on, such as Forbes, this comes from a statistic that states "the median earnings of full-time female workers is 77 percent of the median earnings of full-time male workers" (Hana Rosin, //Slate//). "But what's the difference", some of you may be asking. The difference is that it doesn't take the differences in jobs, positions, or education into account. This is just a compilation of the **total** amount of money all women earn each year in this country compared to how much all men earn each year. Thus, it's not that a woman working as a teacher is going to be payed less than her male counterpart. Instead, it suggests that most women are seeking positions that offer lower wages (say, teachers), whereas men are typically going into fields that pay more (such as doctors). So to all of the girls reading this, don't worry, there are laws in place that require employers not to discriminate based off of sex or skin color.

But let's say this statistic were true. What would happen then? According to the law of demand, a lower price would increase the demand of female workers in all fields. Think about it, if you owned a business, would you rather pay some guy $10 an hour, or a girl $7.70 an hour for the same job? The answer is clear. This would lead to a drastic decrease in female unemployment, if not eliminating it entirely, while upping the male unemployment rate, since nobody would want to hire a man. This little bit of economics right here shows us that original claim is false, as there is widespread female unemployment, and men often times do get jobs that a woman may have wanted.

Now that we know about this, we can take place in more intelligent conversations on the topic. But there's a much bigger lesson to take away from here than the misinterpretation of this statistic. It's that we all need to do more research before we accept something as fact. Doing that will not only allow you to know what you're talking about, but it'd clear up much of the muck surrounding today's politics. So now I leave it up to you guys to become muckrakers yourselves.