The title on her Facebook page reads: “Sara Fried Fitness.” A static banner at the top of the page displays this header: “Sharing My Life * Monthly Online Fitness Groups * Ongoing Personal New Coach Mentorship.” Below is the tagline: “WIFE. Physical therapist turned SAHM to two boys. Fashion lover.” Website visitors are invited to text with questions about fitness, nutrition, or personal development. In a recent post, she laments the impact of a car accident that left her with a herniated disc. She refers to physical therapy as “a career I love…& I mean LOVE,” noting that “Coaching has given me choices. And while I’m going to stay in physical therapy as long as I can, it’s nice to know I have options.” Sara’s social media platform is a living testimony to the unsung progress of women.
Education Gender Gap
She also happens to be my daughter.
Sara is a graduate of Northern Arizona University (NAU), where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Exercise Science. She, along with other female students of the millennial generation (and beyond), make up a majority of full- and part-time students attending U.S. colleges and universities. It’s been this way for quite some time. One has to take a step back in time — 1978 to be precise — to find enrollment records where male students outnumber their female counterparts in postsecondary education. The gender gap has widened considerably in the last four decades.
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Education and Earnings
The strong correlation between education, income, and wealth is common knowledge. What is not well known is the extent to which women have leveraged their education to increase their paychecks. Reports show that increases in earnings have favored women over men for decades.
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On the lower end of the education attainment spectrum, both men and women have experienced declines in weekly earnings. However, the decrease for women was much smaller than for men — a drop of 5 percent for women, compared to a decline of 26 percent for men.
Men with moderate education attainment levels have experienced a decline in weekly earnings of 18 and 11 percent, respectively. At the same time, women with equivalent levels of education increased their earnings by 3 and 5 percent.
Earnings for women with a bachelor’s degree or higher increased 34 percent, while earnings for men rose by 19 percent.
Herein lies the primary evidence for the unsung progress of women.
There is No Gender Wage Gap
“Equal Pay Day” was originated by the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) in 1996. The symbolic day serves as a public relations event to illustrate the pretense of a gender pay gap.
Democratic leaders — President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and others — have mimicked the NCPE’s contention that “In 2018, the median salaries for all full-time, year-round workers showed women earning 81.6 cents for every dollar men earned.” Outlets as politically diverse as HuffPost, Prager University and The Washington Post have explained this statistic and why it is misleading.
The gender gap statistic cites only the average difference between men and women, across all jobs, making no mention of occupation, position, education, number of hours worked, time taken off, or most significantly, the impact of personal life choices. A study by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), a well-known feminist organization, looked at male and female college graduates one year after graduation, and found that when you control for the differences in choice between men and women, the wage gap narrowed to only 6.6 percent.
Choice is the operative word.
Far fewer women choose to work in construction, production, transportation, and material moving occupations, preferring to enter career fields that pay less than those chosen by men. On the other hand, more women choose to occupy a higher percentage of professional and related occupations than men.
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Impacting women’s decision-making processes is their personal preference for jobs with lower pay but greater benefits (time off to raise children), less physical risk, and more stable work hours.
Those asserting that the gender gap is a product of discrimination against women have invested in faulty logic. Using the same reasoning, young men are being discriminated against by young women. After all, twenty-something females have earnings that exceed men’s income by 10 percent or more, at least in certain disciplines. It must also be true that white men are being discriminated against by Asian-American men, who outearn their caucasian brethren by over 5 percent. Silly, right? Such flawed thinking is ridiculous at face value, which drives home the point.
Epilogue
If you compare men and women who hold the same job, with similar backgrounds and qualifications, the wage gap is virtually nonexistent. This runs counter to our political discourse, much of which is firmly entrenched in 1970s-era feminism. Claims that women are being paid less, and this is key — for doing the same work as men — doesn’t hold up to tighter scrutiny. Fact checkers have consistently rated such claims as “mostly false.” Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped politicians and well-intentioned advocates from portraying women as chronic and perpetual victims of discrimination.
This does a disservice to the millions of women who, like my daughter, earned a college degree, pursued their passion, built a career, and made tremendous economic strides. They are making personal career and life choices — often in collaboration with their husband, partner, or significant other — to achieve positive outcomes for themselves, their families, and the communities where they live.
Let’s celebrate the unsung progress of women.
Editor’s Note: A report from the U.S. Census Bureau, “The Changing Economics and Demographics of Young Adulthood: 1975 – 2016,” reveals that young women are pulling ahead of many young men in the workforce. At the same time, young men are falling to the bottom of the income ladder, a trend we will explore in a future blog post.
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