The truth behind the gender wage gap myth isn’t what you’ve been told
Certain myths in the public sphere persist, no matter how many times they have been debunked. One of the most enduring in modern life is the myth of the so-called wage gap.
Recent "sky is falling" headlines warn, "Gender pay gap widens to 81 cents: Difference between men and women increases for second year in a row."
Sound the alarm!
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The truth is, we women are doing just fine, thank you very much.
Better than fine, in fact. By most measures, it’s our boys and men who are struggling.
Boys receive two-thirds of the "D"s and "F"s in our schools, but less than 40% of the "A"s. The oft-cited female gap in math and science is 3 points, while the male gap in literacy is 10 points. According to the (liberal) Brookings Institution, "Girls outperform boys in reading by 40% of a grade level in every state." On our recent national writing exam, only 18% of eighth-grade boys were considered proficient writers.
According to the Pew Research Center, 44% of college students ages 18-24 are men, and that percentage is dropping. Women now constitute the majority of students in grad school (58%), law school (56%), and med school (55%).
Boys are lagging behind girls in most developmental, behavioral, academic, and social markers in all industrialized countries. A 2015 report from the World Health Organization concluded, "In most of the world, girls and women are doing better than boys and men in both physical and mental health indicators."
But this is about the wage gap. What happens when women join the workforce?
To the extent that the gap exists, it can be largely attributed to deliberate and meaningful choices made by women in the work force that prioritize home and family over career: less willingness to relocate, less willingness to work more than 40 hours/week, preference for less demanding jobs that will enable them to spend time with their family when they come home at the end of the work day.
Broad wage gap statistics are often misleading because they fail to account for these preferences. When these variables are considered, the supposed gender pay gap narrows substantially. Research by the American Association of University Women finds that the gap shrinks to just a few cents on the dollar. A U.S. Department of Labor review of dozens of peer‑reviewed studies reached a similar conclusion, finding that most of the commonly cited wage disparity can be explained by choices made by individual workers.
Much of the debate over wages and gender overlooks a basic but uncomfortable reality: men and women often make different choices long before they ever receive a paycheck. Those differences appear as early as college, where students cluster into fields with vastly different earning potential. Men are disproportionately represented in higher‑paying majors like engineering, computer science, and certain sciences, while women dominate lower‑paying fields such as education, counseling, and social work. Even within the same profession, earnings often diverge based on specialization, hours worked, and willingness to relocate. These are not mysterious forces or hidden acts of discrimination; they are the predictable consequences of individual preferences and life priorities.
That observation becomes even more apparent when work is weighed against family life. A young woman I know recently turned down a very prestigious role in the administration to be home with her baby. Her story is not at all uncommon. Many young women don’t want to be "Boss Babes," they would rather nurse their babes. Some would prefer to leave the workforce completely for a time. Statistically, women still want to be wives and mothers, but policy choices made over the last half century have made it increasingly difficult to support and sustain a family on a single income. Thankfully, women are offered more choices and opportunities today than ever before in history. Remote work, job-sharing, part-time opportunities, entrepreneurial endeavors give much desired flexibility. Big corporations offering abortion benefits but not flexibility have rightly earned their disdain.
So, if they must or want to work, they often choose to pass up prestigious or demanding career opportunities to spend time with their children while they are young. There are those on the left who will say this in itself is proof of internalized sexism, but despite the left’s best efforts at social engineering, basic human nature and biology will not be denied. Children do best when raised by two parents, a mother and a father, but when they are little, babies need their mamas.
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British politician Ernest Benn once said that politics is "the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." Few debates illustrate that better than the modern fixation on the wage gap.
When advocates insist that the solution lies in "strengthening childcare and reproductive health supports" while pushing more women into full‑time work, what they are really proposing is not fairness, but compliance. Another attempt to override personal choices in the name of progress, prioritizing workforce participation over families, and children raised by institutions rather than by loving parents in a nurturing environment.
But here’s the thing about a job. Work is transactional. A job does not care if you fall ill. It won’t sit beside you and hold your hand in the hospital. It won’t grieve for you when you are gone. Families do. Yet modern political discussions about pay disparities often diagnose the wrong problem and prescribe the wrong remedies, framing every difference in outcome as evidence of injustice.
Until our policy conversations acknowledge that truth, we will continue to mistake differences in outcome for injustice and sacrifice the things that matter most while congratulating ourselves for doing so.
