#SOTU: It’s time to stop the “equal pay for equal work” lie…

Facts
Facts matter.

Independent Women’s Forum managing director Carrie Lukas tackles the oft-told-by-liberals lie that there is a “wage gap” between what women earn and what men earn for “equal work”:

Yet they [liberals] are behind the curve in using a statistic that is increasingly acknowledged as misleading.Β As feminist writer Hanna Rosin wrote about the 77-centΒ statisticΒ inΒ Slate:

I’ve heard the line enough times that I feel the need to set the record straight: It’s not true.

The official Bureau of Labor Department statistics show that the median earnings of full-time female workers is 77 percent of the median earnings of full-time male workers. But that is very different than β€œ77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.” The latter gives the impression that a man and a woman standing next to each other doing the same job for the same number of hours get paid different salaries. That’s not at all the case.

She goes on to describe – as those of us on the right haveΒ countlessΒ timesΒ before – that it’s the different choices men and women make (hours spent working, industry, fields of specialty, time spentΒ out of the workforce, etc.) that are the primary drivers of the wage gap.

We can all debate why it is that women and men make such different choices, and whether that in itself is a problem society ought to seek to solve.Β Yet it would be nice if first we could all agree to stop misleading Americans by repeating this statistic and pretending that the 23-cent wage gap is evidence of rampant workplace sexism.Β MainstreamΒ journalistsΒ are moving in thatΒ direction; it would be nice if the president’s speechwriters would catch on.

I wish we could put this argument to rest because it has been consistently debunked over and over again but who cares about the truth when you’re trying to – almost literally – buy the women’s vote via emotional manipulation by repeating again andΒ again the same false information about their wages in comparison to their male co-workers? Β It’s bad enough when Democrat politicos keep uttering this nonsense, but the mainstream media also accepts the assertion as “fact” as this CNN piece demonstrates (hat tip):

Working women and their struggles will form a major part of President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, CNN has learned, underscoring the important role women play both in Obama’s domestic agenda and his party’s hopes for this year’s midterm elections.

During his speech, Obama will call for an end to the wage gap between men and women. On average, women earn 77 cents to every dollar a man makes in the workplace

See? Just repeated without questioning, without analyzing. No attempt made at all by CNN to determine whether or not what the President says is factually accurate. Can’t say that I’m surprised, but it’s frustrating nevertheless.

We’ve also seen this same type of shameless pandering from Democrats when it comes to “let’s raise the minimum wage!” arguments. Β Do liberals (and their allies in the press) never learn?