The Wage Gap Between Men and Woman Virtually Disappears When Differences in Behavior Are Taken into Account

Turns out, different people value different things, and when you control for those differences, there's not much difference between what men and women earn.

by Matt Knight
May 27, 2018

April has come and gone, and, with it, the highly publicized Equal Pay Day. It’s the day of the year on which women are said to have finally reached pay parity with men from the previous year; women working full-time, it turns out, only earn 77 percent, 78 percent, or 79 percent of what full-time male workers earn, depending on who you ask.

But there’s a problem with those figures, no matter which you choose: they account for exactly one confounding factor.

One.

Other Conditions Are Not Remaining the Same

In economics, there’s this great, smart-sounding Latin phrase—ceteris paribus—which means “with other conditions remaining the same.” It’s a quick way of communicating the idea that we’re trying to figure out exactly how much impact one factor has in determining an outcome.

Back to our numbers: we’re trying to discover just how much influence sexist discrimination has on women’s earnings relative to men’s, we’ve controlled for full-time status, and now we’re sayi…