Due to the local “encouragement” from my classmates I have decided to dive into a pretty controversial topic known as the wage gap. Also because of my fellow scholars I’m starting a conservative series in the paper known as the Conservative Chronicles. Where I talk about certain conservative issues that I feel are important for the readers to know and understand. In my opinion there is no wage gap between males and females and if there is it is way smaller than what most people think. (Especially that .77 to the 1$)

In order to understand why there is no wage gap we must first look at the economic reasons. The first one being that if businesses could get away with paying women .77 for every dollar a male would earn then I see zero reasons for males to be hired ever again and I would see tons of male workers being fired and see a lot more female workers being hired as a result. Wages are a business’ #1 expense and if they could get rid of about a quarter of that cost they would find it in their best interests to do so.  The biggest interests for a business is to earn profit in the Free Market and ride the waves of Capitalism. So just in case that statement alone hasn’t convinced you let me tell you how the media and celebrities got that statistic. The celebrities that regurgitate that utter nonsense got it by taking the average income a working full time female and dividing it by the average income of a full time working male. (In other words $30,800/$40,000 gets you the .77 statistic) Here is the major problem with that statistic IT DOES NOT TAKE INTO ACCOUNT the amount of hours worked, the amount of education you received, the job you currently have, and the position for that job, and the amount of time you worked at that job. I’m sorry the math may be correct, but not accounting for all of these VERY IMPORTANT variables is just flat out foolish!! Even a study by a  FEMINIST ORGANIZATION the (A.A.U.W.) American Association  of University Women.shows that the actual wage gap shrinks to about 6.6 cents. When you factor in everything I had said before, but the key factor is the personal choice that men and women make in their careers. The KEY WORD is choice here!! The incredibly small wage gap that exists has nothing to do with paying women less than their male counterparts in the workforce; much less sexism as well.

Now we need to discuss something I’ve been wanting to bring up relating to the current issue; celebrities and politics. I hate it when celebrities think that just because they’re famous that means they can sit on their high horse when they accuse politicians and political analysts of “being bigoted”  and “immoral”. I vow to do an article about why no one should listen to celebrities when they talk about politics and the nerve of them when they assume what the average Americans go through on a daily basis and I’m looking at you Ben Affleck and J.K. Rowling. My point is that celebrities need to stop spreading false information like that businesses pay women less than men. If you believe that I want women to be paid less than their male coworkers then that is completely false as well. I definitely think that if your boss is deliberately paying you less than your male co-workers because of your gender/race than you have every right to sue your boss/company they’re working for! What they’re doing is very wrong.

Another point I need to bring up is that in 2009 the US department of Labor released a paper that examined more than 50 peer-reviewed studies that concluded that the oft-cited .23 cent wage gap ( The .77 cents per dollar) “may be almost entirely the result of individual choices made by both male and female workers.” They concluded that once these differences are accounted for across all professions the unexplored wage gap is somewhere between 4.8 and 7% almost identical to the gap found by the A.A.U.W. (6.6%) Instead of calling this a “wage gap” let’s call it an earnings gap because that is what it is an earnings gap. Now what am I talking about you may be asking? Well let me explain it to you the fellow readers. Women deliberately go into low paying careers(By the way I’m also not saying that women shouldn’t have equal opportunities to enter said careers)(Also please take into consideration all the scholarships the U.S. has to offer in these fields as well). A Georgetown University compiled a list of the five best-paying college majors, and the percentage of men and women majoring in those fields. Here are those fields:

1. Petroleum Engineering (87% Male, 13% Female)
2. Pharmaceutical Sciences (48%  Male, 52% Female)
3. Mathematics and Computer Science (67% Male, 33% Female)
4. Aerospace Engineering (88% Male, 12% Female)
5. Chemical Engineering (72% Male, 28% Female)

Notice how women out represent men in only one of the five TOP-PAYING majors by only a few percentage points I might add. Now consider the same study’s list of the five worst paying majors:

1. Counseling and Psychology (74% Female, 26% Male)
2. Early Childhood Education (97% Female, 3% Male)
3. Theology and Religious Vocations (34% Female, 66% Male)
4. Human Services and Community Organization (81% Female, 19% Male)
5. Social Work (88% Female, 12% Male)

Notice now that it is the women who lead in all but one of the five WORST-PAYING majors. Even with the same profession, men and women make different career choices that impact how much money they make. We should probably note that for Theology and Religious Vocations all throughout history especially members of the clergy have always been dominated by males especially because the church would not let women become priests in the past and that might change in this century because of the increasing shortage of male priests and the need to replace the ones that pass. (I realize that Pope Francis said that women will never be Catholic Priests) (However, he is the most progressive Pope to have ever existed and here is a great quote from biography.com “Who am I to judge?”, a comment he made referring to homosexuality, have served to portray him as a compassionate conservative whose views are often considered progressive compared to those of his predecessors.) This is great news because if the Pope can budge on homosexuality then equality in the church for women will come soon enough. Now I understand that money isn’t everything and we should understand that when you decide your career and you want to go into said career YOU SHOULD PUT YOUR HAPPINESS FIRST. No matter what people say you all deserve to be happy my fellow readers regardless of what race, gender, and nationality. Everyone is unique in their own way and everyone fits into their own niche in society.

Now back to the myth that is the wage gap; a great example of this is nursing, where male nurses on the whole earn 18% more than female nurses. Now what is the reason? Male nurses tend to gravitate to the best-paying nursing specialties, they work longer hours, and disproportionately find jobs in cities with the highest compensation. Professor Linda Aiken of the University of Pennsylvania sums up the data: “Career choices and educational differences explain most, if not all, the gender gap in nursing.” Another point worth noting is men are more willing and able to work long hours without advance notice. According to Harvard economist Claudion Goldin even if two lawyers have the same education, same specialty, and work for the same # of hours-firms pay more to someone who is willing to always be “on call” and ready to be in the office when the firm needs them as opposed to wanting a more regular schedule. This isn’t sexism. It’s just common sense. Whatever wage gap remains would eventually be narrowed to the point of vanishing which is basically and I’m giving a rough estimate here between 5-10 years.

 I would like to dedicate this article to Christina Hoff Summers of the American Enterprise Institute, who was in the Prager University video that I got a lot of my information from. I would like to dedicate my new series to my good friends Luke, Tyler, Chris, Adam, Anthony and Robert who not only brought me to conservatism but convinced me that morals shouldn’t be just about everything in politics but have a sense of economics to it as well. If you liked what I wrote god bless you and if you hated what I wrote god bless you as well and if you have something to say then say it in the comments as well I read all the comments and never delete them and always approve them because all criticism and speech is good regardless if that speech is hateful toward me or not. I would also like to say that everything that I have written in this article and in all of all of my previous ones have been entirely my opinion and not of Dakota High Schools. Thank God for the 1st Amendment, thank God for the United States of America and most importantly thank God for the U.S. Constitution. God Bless America.

Here are some fun pictures and memes I found that I hope you enjoy and please do not get offended they’re just fun jabs at my opponents.

–Sincerely,

Bozin Cvetkovski

Sources:

https://www.louderwithcrowder.com/christina-hoff-sommers-wage-gap/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WykFCDLhUjs (LWC)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcDrE5YvqTs (PragerU)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oqyrflOQFc (PragerU)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgeyTelZthc (ChrisRayGun)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osb3NtXom8w&t=6s (ChrisRayGun)

http://www.jobcomet.com/career-finder/theology-religious-vocations

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/01/pope-francis-women-never-roman-catholic-priests-church

https://www.biography.com/people/pope-francis-21152349