Hillary Clinton Is Wrong on the "War Against Women"
This article originally appeared in MarketWatch
“Women earn less than men across our economy — and women of color often lose out the most,” Hillary Clinton says on her campaign website.
She promises to fight for pay transparency and pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would give the federal government more power to intrude into firms’ decisions on pay.
But there’s no mystery about the male-female wage gap. College majors that require high math SATs, such as physics, math and engineering, lead to higher earnings than majors that need less math, such as communications and English literature. Women choose to major in subjects that require less math or lower math SAT scores. That’s one reason they earn less.
The following charts show data from the Labor Department’s American Community Survey on math scores and earnings. If a major is associated with an average SAT math score of 730 out of 800, median annual earnings are in the $52,000 range. Of course, as people start out, their income will be lower, and as they progress in the workforce, their earnings will rise.
U.S. Department of Labor, American Community Survey
At the other end of the scale, if the math SAT score associated with the major is 500 out of 800, then median earnings are lower, around $28,000.
The bottom line: Employers pay more for students who have math-related skills.
This would not matter to the wage gap if men and women had the same average SAT math scores and they chose the same majors. The problem arises because men have higher average math scores and tend to choose majors that require those higher scores.
According to the College Board, average math SAT scores for women were 496, and for men 527, a 31-point difference. AEI scholar Mark Perry notes that this is the continuation of a 40-year trend. Since women’s average SAT scores in math are lower than men’s, it is not surprising that women select majors where math is less important.
Data from the Statistics Brain Research Institute on majors by gender and average math SAT are shown in the chart above. A major that is associated with a 500 on the math SAT is practically all female. A major in the 580 SAT math score range is about half female. And only 20% of women choose a major that requires a 740 math SAT score.
Data from the American Community Survey bear this out. The share of female petroleum engineers graduating between 2010 and 2012 was 12% and in civil engineering it was 22%. At the other end of the scale, women represented 65% of history majors, 72% of French majors and 84% of art history majors.
What would President Hillary do about this? One step toward eliminating the wage gap would be to require that women take more math, and that half of engineering majors be female.
That idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Title IX of the Civil Rights Act (put in place with the Education Amendments of 1972) already requires that the proportion of women playing college varsity sports be equal to the proportion of women on campus, even if fewer women want to play varsity sports. That has led to the closure of many men’s teams. Without additional legislation, Clinton could simply extend Title IX to math, engineering, computer science, chemistry and physics.
Such a solution, although perhaps effective in closing the wage gap, would not be popular with most women, who value the opportunity to choose their own fields and excel in them.
Clinton needs to realize that the wage gap is a product of choices, and that those choices are not limited to college majors. Whenever women join a non-profit instead of a for-profit corporation, whenever women take time off to look after new babies, whenever women choose part-time jobs to better juggle family with career — those decisions all reduce expected lifetime earnings and contribute to the wage gap. Nevertheless, it does not mean that those choices are not equally valid.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth is a senior fellow and director of Economics21 at the Manhattan Institute. Follow her on Twitter here.
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