Hey, Man, The Wage Gap is Real!

     A local right-wing blogger--male, of course--claims on Patch that there is no real issue when it comes to the wage gap between men and women. He has also fallen in love (in 2014) with the 2012 phrase "War on Women", although he unsuccessfully tries to flip the script from the actual issues that led to the creation of the phrase in the first place. 
     Our local zero, er, hero, isn't referring to conservatives like Rush Limbaugh calling young women "sluts" on the radio or ignorant male politicians babbling incoherently about rape or conservative attacks on birth control access; no, he actually tries to claim that liberal women are waging a "War on Women" when they accurately call camera-loving, Fox-"News"/bad-reality-TV-"star" and job-hating former half-term Governor Sarah Palin a "media whore". See how that works? Yeah. Me, either.
     Now our local blogger has opined on the wage gap, alleging that Democratic Congressional candidate Wendy Gruel apparently hasn't exhibited a "modicum of respect" for voters. Hmmm. That's a novel accusation coming from a local blogger prone to character assassination. 
     Anyway, our local blogger is clearly over his head when it comes to wage disparity. I'll push back with some reality:
     One mitigating factor that has actually reduced the gender wage gap is women’s access to higher education. This has helped ease the disparity by nearly 7 percent, but women’s access to college and advanced degrees has not been enough to close the gap completely. Women need an additional degree in order to make as much as men with a lower degree over the course of a lifetime. A woman would need a doctoral degree, for instance, to earn the same as a man with a bachelor’s degree, and a man with a high school education would earn approximately the same amount as a woman with a bachelor’s degree.
     But what causes the remaining gap of more than 10 cents on the dollar—or $4,465 per year among workers making the median wage—between men and women? This is less clear but perhaps more troubling. More than 40 percent of the gender wage gap is “unexplained,” meaning that there is no obvious measureable reason for a difference in pay. This leaves us with possible explanations that range from overt sexism to unintentional gender-based discrimination to reluctance among women to negotiate for higher pay.
     Whatever the reasons, a woman should have recourse if she is being paid less than her male counterpart for the same job. Passing the Paycheck Fairness Act and establishing a commission to address the gender pay gap would both be important steps toward achieving this goal. The paycheck bill has no Republican co-sponsors, of course, and they blocked it from going forward when it came up for a vote in 2012. (A real War on Women, anyone?) Indeed, even Republican women, perhaps a natural place to look for support, voted with their party. Senators Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), who voted for the Lilly Ledbetter Act in 2009, were no votes in 2012. If there's a War on Women, it's a Republican war, through and through. 
     Adding an idiotic note was Fox Business host Melissa Francis, who attempted to justify the gender wage gap by claiming that women fared better than men during the recession because they make less money, allowing them to hold onto their jobs. All-righty, then. 
     The wage gap between men and women is real and the simplistic bleating of a little-read local blogger who mimics boilerplate right-wing talking points doesn't change the facts. It does call for local pushback, however, because someone needs to set the record straight.