The Left Is Wrong: Here’s Proof the Gender Wage Gap Is a Giant Fraud

As a millennial woman who abandoned the secular progressive worldview I was raised with in early adulthood to follow the Lord Jesus Christ, one of the topics I have been most passionate about for years is homemaking.

It hit me like a ton of bricks as a young woman learning to take care of my first apartment (and myself) after moving out for the first time that, rather than an outdated tool of patriarchal oppression, homemaking was really important, really valuable and really enjoyable.

So, I did what I’d been told since a child that I had the power to do as a “liberated” modern woman: I chose what I wanted to do with my life.

And what I wanted was to stick with the model that I had supposedly been emancipated from.

I absolutely love all the cooking, cleaning, and organization that goes along with keeping a home now as a wife and mother, but more than that, I’ve always loved the enterprising challenge of managing a household, something that is so much more than the sum of its parts.

I discovered on my own what many other women my age have also stumbled upon, armed only with an education that prepared us for adulthood by way of academics, extracurricular activities and college applications with little attention given to the domestic arts.

It’s not just my generation. For decades, empowered, emancipated American women who have had all the social support and freedom to pursue high-powered, professional careers — as well as ample federal law protecting them from discrimination in the workforce — have still chosen to prioritize family and homemaking, something which has driven the hardworking feminist ideologues insane.

So, the wage gap myth was born, and feminists have been using it ever since to perpetuate the idea that there needs to be “more equality in the workplace” because women, when given the choice, often choose a different path than their male counterparts.

The Biden administration has capitalized heavily upon the mythology of the “wage gap,” which posits misleadingly that women get paid less than men for doing the same work in the same field.

“President Biden and Vice President Harris have long championed equal pay as a cornerstone of their commitment to ensuring all people have a fair and equal opportunity to get ahead,” the White House said in a statement on “Equal Pay Day” in 2022 that emphasized its commitment to close the “wage gap.”

“In 2020, the average woman working full-time, year-round earned 83 cents for every dollar paid to their average male counterpart,” the statement lamented.

There’s only one problem: this simply doesn’t point to sex-based discrimination so much as discrimination on the part of women who have the choice whether to take on more demanding and high-paying work, or not.

In reality, women earn less than men because they simply choose not to work as much as men do; women put in fewer hours, less overtime and often choose to work in lower-paying fields.

A report on the “gender gap” from The Heritage Foundation in 2021 noted that while the early days of wider female employment following World War II saw women subject to lower wages due to “cultural discrimination,” women have since “come to achieve as much education as, or more education than, men and proven that they are equally capable, their earnings have increased.”

However, the report continued, “Yet, a persistent gap remains between the average wages of men and of women.”

One study cited in the report noted that in environments such as unionized jobs, where gender-based pay discrimination is strictly prohibited, the 11 percent pay gap could be accounted for by “the workplace choices that women and men make” as women choose to take more unpaid time off and work fewer overtime hours.

Another study found no gap within pay grades at the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management, but that as “more females were found in lower grades,” differences in “occupational distribution” could be a factor.

In 2020, a report from Payscale.com found a gender wage gap of just 2 percent when controlled for factors affecting a worker’s wages, which was largely accounted for by differing career distributions between men and women.

This is a point that has been made by conservatives for decades. Women themselves choose jobs that pay less, and it’s very likely that they do so because they value things other than money and career advancement, even after decades of radical social change when it comes to gender norms.

“Logical factors, such as occupation and experience play a role, but it appears that parenthood — and, in particular, the choices that women make in response to, or in anticipation of, becoming mothers — plays a large and growing role in the divergence of men’s and women’s wages, accounting for 80 percent or more of differences,” the report noted.

Imagine that! Many women choose not simply to get pregnant and keep their children, but to deliberately raise them themselves by staying home during those precious little years when having a mother as a primary caretaker is so vitally important to young children.

Now, the average woman will tell you that they certainly support homemakers because “feminism is about choice” — at least, this is what commenters on social media always tell me when I publish pro-homemaking messages.

And if this were indeed the most prevalent feminist message influencing our culture today, we would find nothing wrong with the fact that some women choose jobs that aren’t as high-paying or competitive to (for example) better accommodate marriage and raising a family.

In other words, there wouldn’t be a “wage gap” myth, because anyone who is content to support homemakers would not be offended by the notion that women continue to choose homemaking or otherwise choose not to make the exact same career decisions as men do.

That’s the tricky thing about choice, in fact.

This doctrine that women are empowered when they choose what they want to do with their lives is rather inconsistent with the utopian vision of a post-sex discrimination world that the authors of the most impactful forms of feminism envisioned.

In 1975, Simone de Beauvoir told Betty Friedan, author of the feminist manifesto “The Feminine Mystique,” that she believed women should not be given the option to stay at home.

Beauvoir told Friedan, “We don’t believe that any woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It’s a way of forcing women in a new direction.”

The influential French feminist went on to say that “We see it as part of a global reform of society” and that “every individual, woman as well as man, should work outside,” pointing to communist China as a delightful example of how men and women might live harmoniously without sex differences.

In a way, Beauvoir was right, as we’ve seen by the evidence of choices that modern American women make for themselves.

When given the choice, women still choose paths in life that fall along those supposedly harmful gender stereotypes that giving “choice” to women was supposed to have done away with.

This may be a brand of feminism that thrives in the women’s studies departments of major universities across the free world, but it is simply not a brand of feminism that holds “choice” as its central value.

Instead, it holds forced “equity” as its shining ideal, an “equity” that can only be created if fewer women choose their own career paths in life.

The Biden administration certainly wasn’t interested in “choice” when it laid out its agenda for “equal pay,” because equal pay between men and women would mean a great many women making different choices for themselves than they are right now.

Unfortunately for Biden and those who, rather than furthering basic civil equality for women, are acting instead upon Beauvoir and her postmodern counterparts’ radical ideology on eliminating gender and sex differences as a whole, as well as the family unit, traditional values and the classical Christian worldview.

Women have been able to choose what to do with their lives for decades. The progressives will not be content until they stop choosing anything other than what goes along with their radical agenda.

Contributor, Commentary