I had some very enlightening conversations yesterday in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/fduess/in_2017_men_worked_56_of_all_hours_and_earned_56/ and I've come to the conclusion that some of the members of this sub could benefit by a brief primer on what people mean when they say "the wage gap" and what the wage gap really is.

I will preface this by saying that this isn't some feminist trick, I'm going to present you the statistics that are used to present the wage gap and tell you why they're an incomplete picture of the difference in men and women's wages.

Is there a wage gap?

Ok let's start with the basics.

"Among Full-time year round employees, women earn an average of 76 cents for every dollar a man earns"

That statement is TRUE and comes from the US Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS).

Here is a link to where you can find the data yourself: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/cps-pinc/pinc-01.2018.html

And here is the relevant data in a table from 2018:

Median Income Mean Income
Men 57,219 80,399
Women 46,528 60,986
Women's Earnings as a percentage of men's 81.316% 75.854%

What is the wage gap myth?

The following Statement is False and demonstrates the main way that the wage gap is misused.

"Women earn 76 cents for every dollar a man earns for the same work"

The added "same work" clause is what turns a fact into a lie. The wage gap does not examine two employees working the exact same position, it examines the average of all men and all women in a given work force.

Some reasons why this isn't similar work: men typically choose higher paying professions, women often put their careers on hold when they have kids and therefore are less likely to be in higher positions by the end of their careers, men work more hours, men are more willing to commute further for a pay increase, men are more willing to relocate for a pay increase, men work more high paying specializations within a given industry, men are more likely to overwork (50+ hours per week) and overwork leads to exponential returns on wages. These are just some of the many factors that constitute differences in the work that men and women do on average.

How do hours worked factor into the wage gap?

Even though we're only looking at full time year round employees, there are differences in men and women's average weekly hours worked. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), among persons who usually work full time, men work 43.5 hours and women work 41.1 hours.

If we take the income numbers from the CPS data above and factor out the hours worked this is what we get:

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Median Income per hour Mean Income per hour
Men 25.296 35.543
Women 21.770 28.535
Women's Earnings as a percentage of men's 86.061% 80.283%

Factoring out hours worked from the mean yearly salary we see the wage gap shrink. Hours worked accouts for about 4.429 cents out of the 24 cent gap, or about 18% of the gap.

As mentioned above men are also overly represented in the "overwork" category (50 hrs per week or more) and this leads to exponential returns on wages. Here is a paper discussing that particular aspect of the gap: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0003122414528936

But it's really an earnings gap right?

As shown above there is a gap in average wages between men and women, that is a gap in the rate at which employees are paid. Earnings typically includes revenue from outside sources such as returns on sales. I have not factored that data into the gap and I'm not sure what the results would be. So the "earnings" gap is different than the wage gap, but when people are talking about the gap typically they're not including outside revenues and thus really mean wages.

Conclusion

There are a lot of articles and studies out there that "debunk" the wage gap. That doesn't mean they prove the wage gap doesn't exist, but explain the reasons why it exists and why those reasons aren't necessarily sexist at all. I've given a very brief overview of some of those reasons above, but if you're interested in the wage gap, it's worth doing that research on your own. The purpose of this is just to explain what exactly the wage gap is, since there seems to be a lot of confusion on this sub.