Female Scholar: Gender Pay Gap ‘So Deeply Misleading’ It’s Almost an ‘Outright Falsehood’

What do you know about the gender pay gap?

American Enterprise Institute scholar Cristina Hoff Sommers claims there's not much to know. She says women already earn equal pay for equal work when you look at the data the right way.

Sommers has long criticized elements of feminist thinking, and in a new Prager University video, she characterized the gender pay gap as a fallacy that gets undue attention.

"It is so deeply misleading as to border on outright falsehood," she said of the claim that women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man makes doing the same work.

The 77 cent figure does not account for differences in occupations — when a woman chooses to be a pediatrician, for instance, instead of a higher-paid heart cardiologist — or the fact that, according to Sommers, full-time working women tend to put in fewer hours than men.

When you control for a host of important variables, Sommers contends, "most workplace pay gaps narrow to the point of vanishing."

Sommers claims that women internalize a misguided feminist ideology at modern American universities, and that young women should acknowledge their historic levels of freedom and demand more rigorous thinking from feminism.

"Women who are plagued by workplace injustice or sexual violence will be best helped by truth and solid research — not by hysteria and hype," she says, before advising that young women, "Appreciate and make good use of the unprecedented freedom that you have."

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