PFB Unskewed: Slipping Up on the Wage Gap

PolitiFact Bias (PFB) posted what it deemed to be an "outstanding" contradiction in PolitiFact rulings having to do with the gender wage gap in the United States. They declared they had received a post from an anonymous source which pointed out a "glaring" inconsistency between a ruling on Mitt Romney and one on Colorado Democrat Diana DeGette on just that subject.  Apparently they rushed to publish it in their partisan glee, while neglecting to see what they already had done.

Click to enlarge: This might be Grading PF Liberal Style's comparative ruling to prove
right-wing partisan leanings from PolitiFact, by same logic as PFB.

So let's see what PolitiFact has done before on these types of rulings. PolitiFact has awarded Mostly False to Obama and Rhode Island Democrat David Cicilline for saying (back in June) that women earned 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same job.

 

On the other hand, Diana DeGette and Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine both get Mostly True because they make the distinction that it's 77 cents (or 79 cents in Virginia) on average or overall. So in four rulings on wage disparity, PolitiFact has shown itself to be consistent. The Romney statement, however, is not the same as any of the four cited above.

PolitiFact Bias, through its companion site Sublime Bloviations, has previously posted on the disparity in the case of Obama's statement. They appear to be saying that they believe Obama deserved a worse rating than Mostly False:

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 in this ruling on Mitt Romney that's precisely what PolitiFact did--find out the real number. The four rulings above were quite generic, but this one was about the wage gender gap working in the White House, so they could actually find out with some precision. And this access to precise data enabled them to do exactly what PFB lamented: breaking it down respectively by job and title.

 

So let's try and answer the question posed by PFB: " What was the difference that allowed DeGette to earn a Mostly True versus Romney's Half True?" In the two claims PFB tries to equate, PolitiFact matched the (general statistical) data on DeGette, and found it close to correct, while it found the (specific White House) data on Romney wasn't as close, so found him Half True.

 

Quite contrary to the PFB claim that Romney's statement was more generic, DeGette's statement was actually more generic than Romney's because she was talking about women in general throughout the U.S., not women who worked in the White House.  The 77% is only relevant as it was applied by PolitiFact in both rulings.

 

The rulings of DeGette and Romney are not the same, and are only similar in the topic--women's wages. PolitiFact notes in both the DeGette and matching Kaine ruling that it was correct because of the statistical source (census data and USBLS) and they expressed the caveats for the Mostly True instead of True:

DeGette claimed women "receive only 77 cents for every dollar a man earns." The measure comes from a valid source, though other comparisons indicate the gap is tighter. Also, some occupations have smaller gaps than others.

While all the Democrats emphasize pay discrimination in general for women, Romney's argument was a classic "tu quoque" that wage gap discrimination exists under the Obama who flaunts equality. PolitiFact found that although there was a gap, it was about half the 77 cents on a dollar, because the closer one looked at the data (the specific White House wages they downloaded), the "less striking" the difference became.

 

If someone had said that the women who work on the Romney campaign (and PolitiFact could access that data) earned more or were paid more fairly than Obama's White House staff, PFB could make a validly similar fact-check comparison (if the rulings diverged).  

 

PFB tries to pass off PolitiFact statements as similar when they are not, with a lot of histrionics as if there were some conspiracy going on to rate one statement a single level more true than the other because one is uttered by a Democrat. But closer examination of the rhetoric, the "matches of data" and the specifics--in the method as prescribed by PFB--as well as looking at how PolitiFact has ruled on other statements, shows their complaints are unjustified.

 

Finally, we have PFB creating confusion with its contradictory June post (oopsie!): Obama deserves a False or Pants on Fire for saying women earn 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same job, but Romney deserves better than a Half True for saying women in the White House are paid less than the men. Yet PFB chooses the DeGette statement of 77 cents on the dollar (overall) to make a comparison. With impudence they proclaim PolitiFact partisanism as they so clearly show their own.