Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: Skirting the Wage Gap



At PF Wisconsin wage disparity for doing the same job merits a False; elsewhere, not so.

This post is a combination Grading PolitiFact Review and Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style, because it's turned out to fit both. It focuses on four PolitiFact (PF) rulings on the same subject. Grading PolitiFact’s Bryan White wants them all to be False or Pants on Fire, while to me they're a tentative Half True. The statement is that women earn, on average, 77 cents (or 79 cents or 81 cents, depending on the ruling) for what a man makes…and the addition of “doing the same job” (except for one) which was what brought them down in their rating for the ruling. Four fact-checks on this were done this quarter by PolitiFacts National (a Mostly False for Obama) and Rhode Island (a Mostly False for Congressman David Cicilline) and for the less specific (but supposedly “correct”) statement from senate candidate Tim Caine that it’s not for the same job, which merited a Mostly True from PolitiFact Virginia.

The fourth was from PolitiFact Wisconsin: it was women on average earned 81 cents on the dollar for the same job coming from  Democratic gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Falk, for which she received a False.  So White got his False on one of the statements; however, the PolitiFact Wisconsin review committed the same type of error he lamented in determining the real wage differential among all the occupations, because (according to most of the writers) it couldn’t really be done.

Looking at this chart (see below) from Wikipedia, I don’t know how one couldn’t conclude that women earn less than men. Maybe the gap is closer for the same work in certain categories, but there’s still a gap. Women earn less in almost every occupation ( only more in 4 out of 111, according to PolitiFact Wisconsin). But since we know women generally earn less overall, that gender bias exists (and studies show we’re not sure why) and it’s difficult to find evidence to show that women earn less for the same work across the board, the Mostly Falses (and the False) should have been more like inconclusive Half Trues.

Click to enlarge:  Women's median usual weekly earnings as percentage of men's, for full-time workers, by industry, 2009.

The ruling on Tim Caine of Mostly True where he didn’t add the “for the same job” came with the subtitle “There are many ways to look at pay gap.” This should have been how the “Mostly False” finders should have looked at this to conclude a Half True. Indeed there are many ways to look at it, but there’s still a gap.

When I started out in my “career path” it was as a secretary: I took shorthand, typing, and had enrolled in what was then called “cooperative education” where I only had morning classes and part of my educations was credits for working in an office in the afternoon. Eventually it led to a full-time job with a large company. I also learned in very short order that I needed to get a bachelors degree or some other training after realizing that the secretary salary was not enough to live on.

But just why was my salary so low? In history, the original “secretary” was a distinguished male job: in our government we have the Secretary of State, of the Navy, of Defense, etc., of which up until women became associated with it, was only a male occupation. But it shows that the title of Secretary was considered a highly regarded position. As it came to be more of a “female” job, however, it was less regarded and compensated accordingly.

The “lower wages for women” was even noticeable as I worked full time for a company that strove to provide equal treatment because of the hourly workers union’s influence, even though we were salaried. I often followed one of the first females to be hired in a department (accounting); then, as management saw women could do the job just as well, eventually most of the department would be women. One of my last positions was in Cost Accounting. It began as almost 100% male (except for the secretary!) back in the 1970’s. Then in the 1980’s and 1990’s it gradually became almost 100% female. It became almost all female because management (as one manager suggested to me) could get away with paying them less. In the 1970’s one could only get a job in Cost Accounting with experience and through promotion. By the 1990’s it was considered an entry level job. In other words, it was like the fall of the vaunted secretary. But even under-paying women wasn’t enough cost savings as eventually the Cost Accounting was off-shored to Mexico….where most of the workers were males.

So for PolitiFact to say it’s Mostly False that women earn 77 cents on the dollar because it was added that “it was for the same job” or even any job is somewhat disingenuous. What the .77 means is that wage-wise we are .77 of a man. To say it’s because women work jobs that “traditionally pay less” ignores the premise of WHY they traditionally pay less. I would even posit that the reason wages in the United States have not kept up as a whole is because of women entering the workforce. I can remember, however, for the longest time it was 69 cents on the dollar, so at least we’ve made an improvement.

The red state issue I’ve previously posted about also raises its ugly head here: the reason you see teachers and police have near equal wages is because of the unions. Wage equality is an absolute “must” with them. And it’s reflected in the fact that the wage inequality is worse in the red “right to work” states with a few exceptions. So I would also posit that as people like Wisconsin governor Scott Walker eviscerate the union’s power (which is actually happening), you will see the wage gap grow again.

The attempt to determine whether women make less doing the same work is open to doubt as aptly described in the Cicilline factcheck by Eugene Emery:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics tried to do that, too. Table 2 of the report compared the weekly earnings for men and women -- all employed full time -- for 501 occupations.

However, for nearly 8 out of 10 of those jobs, the analysts didn't have enough data on male workers or female workers to make a reliable comparison.

Among the 111 categories for which a comparison was possible, women in 45 jobs were paid less than 80 cents on the dollar and women in 35 positions were paid 80 to 90 cents for every dollar paid to men doing same task.

So, for just over 40% (45/111) of the categories women earned less than 80 cents for the same job; for another almost 32% (35/111) women were paid 80 to 90 cents for every dollar paid to men “doing the same task”. That’s over 70% for which we KNOW women are paid less for the same job, although not 77% or 81% (this tends to undermine the False awarded by PF Wisconsin). In other fact-checks, as much as 85% (of the subject number of a statement) can make it "True". That does not qualify for Mostly True because of the question on the remaining 30%. In other words, this gets us to Half True.

ON the other hand, my conservative counterpart thinks this merits as much as a Pants on Fire because…

The Obama campaign made a claim about disparate pay for men and women doing the same work and tried to support it with a statistic that doesn't take into account the type of work done. That's a flatly wrong approach, perhaps even "pants on fire" if one believes in applying subjective judgments to rulings on matters of fact.

PolitiFact's conclusion suggests that the Obama campaign was trying oh-so-hard to simply convey that men and women are paid differently irrespective of the jobs they do and (oopsie!) just happened to get a little mixed up in the delivery. There's one way to keep the statistic from earning a "False" rating or worse: Find out the real number and determine whether the 77 cent figure is somewhat close.

So the statistic “doesn’t take into account the type of work done”: IS THERE STILL A WAGE GAP? Even where the pay is very close, there’s still a disparity. As usual, writer White ignores the bigger picture: women almost always earn less than men regardless of the type of job. It doesn’t matter if it’s the same work. Because as I’ve pointed out above, the entry of women into an occupation often lowers the salary threshold, and much of the actual data is inconclusive, although it’s been pretty well quantified by PolitiFact that a bit over 70% of women make from less than 80 cents to about 90 cents on the dollar that men do for the same job. And as usual, he creates a conspiracy by PolitiFact to make Obama “look good.”

As for his pointing out that Factcheck.org made the same fact-check with the conclusion that Obama was “flat wrong” I would say if I was reviewing this for the Politi-Score or other comparison I would translate it to a Mostly False in the context of the lead statement being accurate (particularly the use of the word “exaggeration” in the title), so in fact the two fact-check ratings matched. But I would disagree with the conclusions of both: “The Obama campaign took a legitimate statistic and described it in a way that makes it sound much more dramatic than it actually is.” The statement was partially accurate in the “legitimate statement”,while the evidence of the added drama from Obama—"for the same work"--was somewhat indeterminate…which is to say, Half True.