Fairfield writes:

Economists believe that discrimination as well as personal choices within occupations are two major factors. They also attribute part of the gap to men having more experience and logging more hours.

If you're not catching it, "personal choices" is code for "entering and leaving the work force for children" and "logging more hours" isn't the same as having more experience, it's "not taking time off for your kids." Of course, those of us who have actually — as single, childless women — logged more hours, had more experience and never left the work force and yet still somehow magically experienced pay discrimination, well, we're obvious outliers.

That is, unless you account for those things.

"There's no measurable way to explain the gaps within occupations," said Barry T. Hirsh, a labor economist at Georgia State University. "Other wage gaps, like racial gaps, can be almost fully explained by factoring in the differences in education, geography and age."

What Hirsch is saying, despite Fairfield's careful wording, is that it's because of discrimination, not "women's choices."

Fairfield does get one economist on the record blaming the wage gap — that is, the overall wage gap, not the one that exists within occupations when accounting for experience, hours, education, geography and age — on women's choices.

"Desire for a certain flexibility or a certain lifestyle drives career choices," said Stephanie Boraas, an economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Women often choose jobs that have more flexible hours, which can work well with child care."

Fairfield additionally posits that the wage gap in the medical field is due to women "picking" — as opposed to, say, being "encouraged" into — lower paying fields like general medicine rather than taking up surgery, not that she does the research to see if women in surgery or general medicine still make less than their male counterparts. Of course, despite the fact that the federal government has statistics breaking down wages in medical specialties (and 800 total occupations), they only release data on the wage gap for 200 occupations and lump all doctors in together — but when the statistics show that male registered nurses do better than their female colleagues in a completely female-dominated occupation, you'd better have some hard numbers to show me that women have wage equality in female dominated medical specialties, and the government and thus Fairfield don't.

Fairfield then asks:

But why do men who are bus drivers or insurance agents, jobs with similar numbers of men and women, earn more money than their female counterparts?

Umm, discrimination? Like, maybe it's a bigger factor than "women's choices" despite what she posits throughout her entire piece? Yes, women that choose family practice over neurosurgery or, um, perhaps blogging over lobbying can expect to make less money than neurosurgeons or lobbyists. We're not bitching about that. We're bitching about the fact that female bloggers probably make less than their comparable male counterparts, and that female lobbyists definitely make less than their comparable male counterparts, and female family practitioners probably make less than their male counterparts and female neurosurgeons probably make less than their male counterparts. That is the point of pay discrimination laws, and Ledbetter v. Goodyear and the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. It is not that if I choose a lower-paying field I make less money than men (or women) who choose a higher-paying field — and to suggest so lends credence to the argument made by plenty of discrimination-apologists that we're all just looking for special treatment when we're really just asking for equality.

Why Is Her Paycheck Smaller? [New York Times]

Related: National Employment And Wage Data From The Occupational Employment Statistics Survey By Occupation, May 2007 [Bureau of Labor Statistics]
Median Weekly Earnings Of Full-Time Wage And Salary Workers By Detailed Occupation And Sex [Bureau of Labor Statistics]

KAY: Hi.

MEGAN: Good morning, sunshine!

KAY: Ugh. Last night I stumbled into an event where they kept giving us top-shelf liquor, not that I'm complaining.

MEGAN: I truly feel that the top shelf stuff makes the hangover far more bearable.

KAY: That's true, but there was a LOT of it. Especially since I've been on a beer and wine diet these days.

MEGAN: Just think how much worse your head would feel if you had been drinking rail liquor. Or, rather, don't right now, but consider it later... Anyway, how's Denver?

KAY: Right.
Oh you know. High altitude. I actually met some real-life PUMAs yesterday.

MEGAN: Really? I'm intrigued. What did they say? I saw them at the DNC protests in June and it was all I could do not to shake them and stuff.

KAY: I hate to use Mark Penn language, but they were totally national security moms. They thought Hillary Clinton's hawkishness was a good thing, while Obama would be "thinking about" what to do. Because apparently "thinking" is a bad thing.

MEGAN: Ugh, well, I guess we know who will be voting for McCain in the fall, then. No thinking, just bombing!

KAY: Right.

MEGAN: I'm sure in the midst of the whole thing, you missed the fact that Madonna kicked off her world tour this weekend. Or that she used the opportunity to compare John McCain to Hitler and Mugabe. Did I ever tell you how much I love Madonna?

KAY: I saw that this morning.

MEGAN: Video of the offensive video display is here. And what's even better is the shots of her are very Human Nature, which I love so much.

KAY: Weird, so Madonna isn't dormant anymore. She kinda dropped out of sight for a while.

MEGAN: Well, she and Guy Ritchie are supposedly on the outs! It's okay, you don't have to love Madonna as much as me. We can talk about how Chis Matthews says he didn't call Clinton a "she-devil" — he was saying Republicans did. That didn't work for E.D. Hill, buddy, but nice try.

KAY: I like Madonna I just always cringe when liberals use the Hitler references. It gives more moderate people an excuse to make fun. Bad as McCain is on issues, he doesn't appear to be plotting mass genocide. But I guess it's never too early to speculate...

MEGAN: Well, I mean, with McCain's video showing Germans chanting Obama's name over shots of Berlin, I think it's fair to say that McCain went there with the references first.

KAY: So true. The Hilter references are so tired, though. Anyway, I saw the thing about Matthews. I always love when people on television try to claim they didn't say something.

MEGAN: I prefer when the bluster and say they didn't say it, and then when they argue it was taken out of context. Like, just admit that you're an unthinking asshole, buy Hillary some apology flowers or something and commit to hosting a documentary on sexism in the media.

KAY: That seems like a reasonable response. I mean, when you've already had to make a public apology to someone, it seems that maybe it's time to just admit that you say stupid things.

MEGAN: I admit, I say stupid things! See, it's really not that hard!

KAY: Chris Matthews could learn so much from Megan Carpentier.

MEGAN: If nothing else, I'll bet I have better taste in cheap wine! Okay, one last think, can we discuss this new bullshit meme where Republicans like Bill Kristol and John McCain pretend they give a shit about the glass ceiling and sexism because they think we're dumb enough that if they pay lip service to it for 45 seconds we'll vote for them?

KAY: Ugh, this is ridiculous. I hate it when conservatives try to claim that they're more into affirmative action than liberals. Don't worry, though, they wouldn't want to promote policies that try to try to address gender equity or anything. I hear I just need more "training" and then discrimination will just disappear.

MEGAN: Oh, right! Silly me! If I were just smarter, and worked harder and were more aggressive, if I put off getting married and having children and just focused on my career, I'd totally be in the same position as a man my age would. If I weren't a blogger, that is. But, still. If all men were that much more aggressive than me, we wouldn't really have a civilization.

KAY: Right, but be careful with becoming a "career girl." You wouldn't want to become some kind of frigid bitch that never has children. That would be the worst thing in the world.

MEGAN: Right, if I never breed because I'm too aggressively pursuing my career and my "training" so that I can be equal with a man, no man will want to ever marry me or seed my uterus, and I will live a life of misery forever. Being a girl is so hard. Not as hard as getting up at 6:30 local time to do Crappy Hour with me after a night of drinking, though!

KAY: I get the feeling it's gonna be like this all week.

If there's one thing that's fairly obvious to anyone that's been a victim of unequal pay — Lily Ledbetter, for example, whose case was thrown out by the Supreme Court last year because she didn't know she'd been discriminated against until it was too late to sue — it's that the hardest thing to prove in an unequal pay case is that you're making less money and doing the same/more work. Harman's legislation is designed to shame companies who have big pay gaps, combat the lack of information that stymies women when they try to rectify the situation and call attention to the issue. The legislation would also prohibit employers from forcing employees to sign contracts that specify they can't disclose their salaries, to which one in four Brits are subject.

Sadly, surveys in Britain regularly show that people really believe that women make less money than men because they choose to work in more poorly remunerated jobs — no one thinks that those jobs might be more poorly remunerated because they are staffed largely by women — and because women choose to take care of their families. Of course, in a system in which men get 2 weeks paternity leave and women a year, and in which there's virtually no flexibility on hours or provisions for child care (hey, it sounds like America!), "choose" is maybe not the most apt word.

For my part, I know full well I have received unequal pay at at least 2 prior jobs. In the first job, I took over from a man who made $45,000 after working there for 2 years. I came in (with a Master's degree) at $38,000 and left 2 years later making $42,000. The next job I took, I twisted the boss's arm to get $50,000 to start, and found out when my boss sent me to find something else on his messy desk that my predecessor made $58,000. By all accounts, I worked twice the hours and built the position into something much more important to the organization, but when I left after 3 years, I was making $55,000. Did I have a case? It's possible, but hard to prove without the cooperation of my predecessors and an admission by the organizations that what my job turned into was of equal or greater responsibility. On the other hand, knowing that I was making less money than my predecessors and discovering that there's always more money for a position than the person hiring you will admit to, has made me an iron-willed salary negotiator. If everyone knew what everyone else was making, it would put a lot more power in the hands of the laborers and less in the hands of management — which seems like it should naturally be the position of Britain's Labour Party. How can we get us one of those?

Harman Vows To Tackle 'Entrenched Discrimination' In The Workplace [The Guardian]
Pay Gap Between Sexes To Go Public [Reuters]
Harman Vows To Force Through 'True Equality' In The Workplace As Row Rages Over Plans To Discriminate Against White Men [Daily Mail]
TAP Talks With Lilly Ledbetter [The American Prospect]
New Equal Pay For Women Deal [The Sun]
What Kind of Equality? [The Guardian]