Equal Pay Day Commemorates a Mythical Pay Gap

Equal Pay Day falls on April 4 this year, and purportedly represents how far into 2017 women must continue working to earn what their male counterparts earned last year. The National Center for Pay Equity promotes Equal Pay Day annually to bring attention to the so-called “gender pay gap,” which claims that women receive 20% lower pay on average for doing the same work as men. But the 20% gender wage gap is actually a tiresome statistical myth that persists in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The reality is that men and women make very different career and work choices, and frequently play very different family roles, especially for families with children. Those choices reasonably account for most of gender differences in earnings and don't point toward widespread gender pay discrimination in the workplace.