On 77 Cents, Adjusting for Reason

Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden are evidently throwing in the towel on their presidential campaign.

On Wednesday, at the Democratic National Convention, Biden avowed that he and Obama would “never give up until we achieve equal pay for women. That's the change we need.”

Efforting to exact equal standards and treatment in the labor market for women and men ought to be a moral compulsion for all policy-makers and employers. In political rhetoric, championing these efforts and repudiating present conditions, whatever they may be, also functions as a powerful, emotion-seizing assertion.

The implication of Biden's assertion, however, that women have not achieved equal pay, has been demonstrated to be ostensibly groundless and inapplicable to the present context. While it is true that in raw terms, the mean full-time, year-round working woman still earns roughly 77% of the average man, this superficial examination does not consider professional interest, academic background, or comparative domestic advantage. Eric Eide (2007) and Arrah Nielsen (2005) show that when accounting for academic major and/or professional experience the gender wage gap had disappeared entirely among college-educated men and women by the beginning of the decade. For an explanation of the various reasons why the gap still exists as it does in its absolute context, see Nielsen’s elucidation.

Of course, promoting economic, social, and political equality across gender is a necessary principle and should be manifested with prudent policy. Does gender inequality still exist in some form in the labor market? Almost certainly. Particularly at the highest levels of business and government, women still appear to be marginalized, intentionally or otherwise. Just look at the bigoted commentary made about Senator Hillary Clinton during the Democractic Primary election and now about Governor Sarah Palin just in the past couple of days. Nevertheless, concerns over systematically unequal outcomes of women in the American labor market are largely obsolete.