The gender "pay gap" results from preference, not prejudice
Income equality is the wrong goal, equal opportunity the correct one
A large and apparently growing number of women decry the apparent differences between income earned by women and that earned by men across our society, typically blaming the differences on allegations of a patriarchal tyranny created by white men to dominate their female counterparts. Like many divisive complaints by “social justice warriors”, the gender “pay gap” has some evidentiary support and some nonsensical conspiracy theories.
There is no doubt that across many nations the reported data show that on average women earn less than men. In Canada, according to government reports, women earn about 11% less than men. The Ontario government pay equity office states the following:
”Research shows that factors such as education, job tenure, part-time vs. full time work, public vs. private sector work, firm size, unionization rates, occupation, industry, and demographics, can only explain about 30 percent of the gap in Ontario. Seventy percent of the gap remains unexplained. This unexplained portion may be due in part to factors such as gender discrimination and societal expectations and constraints (emphasis added)”
The report does not delve into whether personal preferences play any role in the reported differences and is quick to suggest “gender discrimination” is a possible factor. That claim is unsupported by hard data and relies solely on anecdotal evidence, and while there is no doubt there are cases of “gender discrimination” in Canada, it is not only discrimination against women but also discrimination against men. The growing effort to have women equally represented on corporate boards of directors independent of merit is an example of such discrimination. Boards entirely composed of a majority of either women or men should result from appointments based on knowledge and competence alone, and there are examples of each.
Equal proportions of men and women in differing careers is a silly goal. The Mining Industry is making efforts to recruit more women into mining while the evidence is clear women prefer other lines of work and need “encouragement” to be interested in a career in mining. Healthcare has a predominantly female workforce and 70% of pharmacists are women. The legal profession has a roughly equal proportion of men and women lawyers. Over 90% of plumbers are men. These disparate outcomes don’t result from prejudice but from choice.
Social scientists have made repeated efforts to study gender based wage differences but only one large scale, global study has been completed which involved 80,000 subjects across a number of countries and measured the “gender pay gap” as a function of the degree to which each country was (or was not) egalitarian as between men and women and their opportunities. The study used the Gini Coefficient as a measure of the degree to which there was (or was not) equal opportunities for each gender.
The Gini Coefficient is a statistical measure of income inequality among the population of a given country. The higher the coefficient, the greater the inequality, regardless of the causes of the inequality. It is just math. Countries with low levels of inequality of income have low Gini Coefficients and those with very wide differences in income levels have high coefficients.
The study I reference was reported in Science magazine and made the remarkable finding that the countries with the lowest Gini Coefficients had the highest wage gaps as between women and men. It was the Scandinavian countries that had the lowest Gini Coefficients, a result of overt policies implemented over many years to ensure all citizens had more or less equal opportunities. The study concluded as follows:
In a nutshell, men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people (according to a large scale study published in the National Library of Medicine) , and their choices of careers reflect those preferences. The preferences do not universally mean women will choose lower paying careers but across the breadth of society, on average that is the result.
I was the founder of the modern Rexall Drug Store chain and as I built the business I learned that 70% of pharmacists were women while only 31% of them owned their own pharmacies. While the preponderance of large chains like Shoppers Drug Mart and Jean Coutu explain why fewer women were owners, a look at independent drug stores showed owners were largely men. A recent report on Women in Pharmacy confirmed my experience.
Pharmacists typically earn about $150,000 a year while store owners earn about half of that amount from their ownership. Rexall had 36 stores the last year I held control of the chain through my interest in Algonquin Mercantile Corporation, and store profit was $2.6 million or about $72,000 per store. Independent pharmacists who owned their own store combined their store profit with their income as a pharmacist, of course, but found they had to work much longer hours than a pharmacist who had no role in store management. More often than not, pharmacist owners were men and, in the case of Rexall, me (through corporations I controlled).
There are no barriers to women pharmacists owning their own store. Other than being a pharmacist, the barriers to entry are low. My opinion is that on balance women preferred the lifestyle benefits of well-paid employment without the hassle of managing the non-pharmacy operations of a drug store, and eschewed the opportunity for somewhat higher earnings for a more balanced work-life experience. Through Rexall, I owned 36 stores and would have been delighted if the profit for each store was anywhere close to the income of the related pharmacists.
I am aware of no activist group complaining that men are underrepresented in the pharmacy industry. There are pharmacists of every race, colour, faith or sexual orientation across Canadian drug stores. What distinguishes pharmacists is that they chose the profession and graduated from pharmacy colleges. That is the way it is and is also the way it should be.
Equal opportunity is a desirable goal for society, but equality of income is a shibboleth. Women on average live five years longer than men, have fewer heart attacks and suffer less from degenerative diseases, in part a result of their life choices. My father used to say: “You won’t live forever, but if you marry the right woman, it can feel like forever”.