It’s Time for a Woman President

A woman will be elected president. And soon. It’s not that Clinton, with all her known baggage, is already within 4% of the leading Republican, Giuliani, in the latest election polls.

No. It’s things like a Harvard president getting fired for candidly discussing statistical data on the differences between male and female math and science scores.

And it’s stories like the annual gender pay gap wrap-up, and attribution of that gap to discrimination against women. People who believe this canard are certainly people who believe it’s time to elect a woman, and set the world rightside up.

Here are major findings of the latest gender pay gap study:

• one year out of college, women in 1994 earned 80 percent of what their male counterparts made.

• Controlling for the number of hours worked, parenthood and other factors, college-educated women still earned 12 percent less than their male peers.

• [It’s true that] engineering and computer-science majors typically command higher salaries than those with education or English degrees.

For a different take on the gender pay gap, one can read Warren Farrell’s book Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap—and What Women Can Do About It. Farrell, a feminist, found that:

• women who compete for the same job often earn more than men, not less.

• women commonly prefer jobs with shorter and more flexible hours to accommodate the demands of family.

• women generally favor jobs that involve little danger, no travel and good social skills--jobs that generally pay less.

• full-time men clock an average of 45 hours a week, while women put in 42 hours; men are more than twice as likely as women to work at least 50 hours a week.

• men represent 92 percent of all occupational deaths.

In addition, consider this. Women currently make up 57% of those in college. And consider this. College graduates earn 75% more than high school graduates over a lifetime of work.

If 57% of the people in college are women, that means 14 of every 57 females in college are college graduates while their high school male graduating counterparts aren’t. The left-behind males end up earning just 57% of what a college graduate earns. It seems unfair to compare the wages of each sex without recognizing that far more women go to college, and thus earn far more over their lifetime than the males who never made it to college.