Blake Masters Told a Female Cop the Gender Pay Gap Is a Myth

When we last checked in on Blake Masters, the Republican nominee for Senate in Arizona, he had deleted his support for a federal abortion ban from his campaign website. Now, he’s doubling down on his unhinged view that men earn more money because they do the “risky” and “most dangerous jobs,” and that the gender pay gap is nothing more than a “left-wing narrative.”

On Saturday, Masters appeared on the radio show KVOI Inside Track when a woman named Laurie called in and identified herself as a lifelong Republican who is “very much torn” over whether she’s going to vote for Masters or stay home, partly because of Masters’ statements about women not having “dangerous” jobs. (The clip starts at 15:30 here.) Laurie said she’s a Tuscon police officer who wears a bulletproof vest every day while driving in a marked police vehicle and wanted to know if he still stood by that statement.

Masters began his response by thanking Laurie for her service, before saying that, yes, he still thinks the gender pay gap is a myth—and claimed that when controlling for type of job, men and women are paid exactly the same.

This is flatly false. Per the U.S. Department of Labor, women earn less than men in nearly all occupations. The DOL site says: “You can see how women’s earnings compare with men’s in over 350 occupations using our interactive visualization tool. There are only a handful of occupations where women earn slightly more than their male counterparts, such as health care social workers.”

Here is Masters’ full, insane response:

What Democrats do here is, they take everything out of context. They have multi-million dollar ad budgets and they just try to villainize me on TV. I’m up against the whole national Democrat machine. They’ll take two seconds of audio and try to, try to spin things. So all I said was, the gender pay gap is a myth. The gender pay gap is a myth.

Women police officers like yourself, God bless you, you get paid just as much as the male police officers—please tell me if that’s not correct. The issue is, dangerous jobs, like being a police officer, tend to pay more than less dangerous jobs, such as being a teacher. And so, if you look, male police officers get the same amount as female police officers, male teachers make the same amount as female teachers when you adjust for all the variables. Now, there are more male police officers and more female teachers. So if you average everything together, the Democrats, they can find a way to twist the statistics to suggest this giant gender pay gap.

And all I said when asked about the question was, ‘no that doesn’t exist if you control for all these variables.’ I think people in dangerous professions, and there’s plenty of women doing it—I conceded that, I said that, clearly. The Democrats just don’t show you that context, and that’s why their fundamental approach here is so dishonest. Mark Kelly has to lie about me, he has to contort my words to even have a chance of winning, and it’s all a distraction from his open borders, pro-inflation, failure of supporting Joe Biden’s agenda.

Masters’ opponent, Mark Kelly, is consistently leading in the polls, so you’d think Masters would cynically press pause on making statements that alienate women voters, kind of like he did on abortion. (And, gee Blake, if you had true support from voters and Republican leadership, wouldn’t you have your own multi-million dollar ad budget?)

Masters made his original comments in February  while arguing against the need for the Equal Rights Amendment, which would ban discrimination on the basis of sex. “We got to push back on the fake left-wing narrative that women don’t have equal rights in this country,” he said.

Women don’t have equal rights in this country. Hope this helps!