Autumn 2011

Career, Interrupted

THE SOURCE: “Why the Gender Gap Won’t Go Away. Ever.” by Kay S. Hymowitz, in City Journal, Summer 2011.

Almost 50 years after the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, studies show that women still earn between 75 and 81 cents for every dollar men earn. It’s wrong simply to attribute this discrepancy to the straw man of gender discrimination, argues Kay S. Hymowitz, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a New York City think tank. Lots of other factors are at play, such as women’s preference for the kinds of careers that naturally bring in less cash.

Preferences aside, Hymowitz believes that the architecture of studies assessing the wage gap contains significant flaws. Researchers who compare the full-time earnings of women and men ignore the fact that many women work fewer hours in their full-time positions than men do. Twenty-seven percent of men with full-time jobs worked beyond the average 40-hour work week in 2007, while only 15 percent of women with full-time jobs did.

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