— And in particular, the myth that the left keeps perpetuating in order to keep the focus on lady bits:  “women making only 72 percent of what their male counterparts earn.”

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, NRO:

[…] women don’t make 72 cents on a man’s dollar, or 77 cents on a man’s dollar, one of Obama’s favorite statistics. This comes from comparing the earnings of all full-time male employees with all full-time female employees. This averages together women who work as social workers with men who work as investment bankers; female English-literature majors with male engineers; and male loggers with female administrative assistants. Part of the gap is differences in hours worked, because full-time means any number of hours above 35 hours, and full-time women work fewer hours than men, on average. When comparisons are made between men and women who work 40 hours per week, women make 87 percent of men’s earnings.

There’s really no reason that, on average, men and women should be paid the same if they choose different majors in college, different jobs when they graduate, and different hours of work. What’s important is comparing men and women with the same job tenure in the same position in the same firm. If there’s a big difference under those circumstances, then there may be discrimination, giving women grounds to sue.

When economists compare men and women in the same job with the same experience, they earn about the same. Studies by former Congressional Budget Office director June O’Neill, University of Chicago economics professor Marianne Bertrand, and the research firm Consad all found that women are paid practically the same as men.

Moreover, federal law for decades has provided legal remedies for women who encounter pay discrimination. If women actually were paid 77 cents — or even 90 cents — on the dollar for the exact same work as men, they could sue. It turns out that American women do not suffer from systematic discrimination.

President Obama says he’s in favor of equal pay, but women staffers in his White House are paid 90 cents on a man’s dollar — if one calculates the figure, incorrectly, based on simple averages.

Women have unparalleled freedom to choose their fields of study and careers. But many prefer to work part-time in order to combine work and family. Family-friendly jobs with flexible hours pay less than jobs with longer, inflexible hours.

It’s not the glass ceiling that keeps women out of the corner office; it’s a choice of how much time and effort to put into one’s career. The millennials call it “work-life balance.”

[…]

Look at women at Yale Law School, for instance. In 2012, as it has done in many other years, Yale Law Women — a group that features some of the smartest people in the world — made a list of “Top Ten Law Firms,” in categories related to family friendliness. Yale Law Women picked firms that supported part-time and flex-time work, and had generous parental-leave policies. “One of the goals of the Top Ten List,” the group wrote on its website, “is to generate discussion about family friendly policies at top law firms.” These are women who have the credentials to aim for the C-Suite at major corporations, but some are already planning for part-time and flex-time. There’s no problem with those choices, but these same women shouldn’t cry “discrimination” when they don’t make it to the top.

The myth of the wage gap is pervasive, but demonstrably false. […]

Unfortunately, “demonstrably” doesn’t carry the weight it once did.  We live in a grievance culture. And having been Balkanized and conditioned to think and act along identity politics lines — another tool exploiteed by ideological leftism to break down the very notion of individual autonomy and self-reliance (which people like Amanda Marcotte insist is a myth, this notion that one can or even should declare a kind of independence from the most invasive forms of government) — we fall back on our grievance narratives because to do so is much easier than to accept that our own choices can and should have consequences, among them, economic consequences.

And there is no shortage of politicians who are willing to acknowledge and pretend to commiserate with your lather.

But the truth is, when the variables are the same, this idea of a wage gap — suggestive of institutionalized discrimination against women — all but disappears.  And yes, I believe it should disappear entirely, and would be willing to fight to make sure that happens.

What I won’t do, however, is take the path of least resistance and pretend to take the demagoguery of gender bias in the workforce as some sort of cultural given, empowering a grievance industry that in the end is only there to perpetuate itself:  once the “discrimination” goes away, the industry would dry up and blow away.  And the people invested, career-wise, in such industries can’t allow that to happen.

They need to make a living after all.