5 Absurd ‘Equal Pay’ Comments in Time for Bogus Holiday
Editor’s Note: Story contains graphic content and links to explicit video.
Cherry blossoms are blooming and as sure as a springtime rainstorm liberals are repeating false claims that women make significantly less than men do for the same work. Why? Discrimination, of course.
The feminist holiday Equal Pay Day is April 14, this year and already media outlets are marking it with complaints about how a “gender pay gap” concerns graduating women. Time ridiculously included a photo essay called “Life Before Equal Pay Day: Portrait of a Working Mother in the 1950s.”
Supposedly, Equal Pay Day marks the day a woman has to work to from the beginning of the previous year to make as much as a man. Those who claim there is a discriminatory wage gap continually claim women make only 77 cents, or 78 cents on the dollar compared to men. Politicians, including President Barack Obama, liberal media and left-wing activists repeat the claim often. But it’s a “bogus statistic,” that even some liberals call a “lie.”
Buzzfeed promoted that idea that women just 78 percent of what men do on April 9, 2015, with a humorous video called “One Woman Discovers the Wage Gap.” In it, a female office worker starts doing only “78 percent” of her job after finding out how much less she makes.
In 2014, Obama claimed women make only 77 cents (or 78 cents) to the dollar a man makes and called it an “embarrassment.” The Washington Post Fact Checker gave the president two “Pinocchios” for that statement, because the statistic is completely “misleading.” In reality, the stat is so bad, Hanna Rosin at Slate.com called for people to stop repeating the “lie.”
Obama and the media have portrayed any gender “pay gap” as the result of overt discrimination, which is already illegal, rather than the result of making different choices.
The 77-cent or 78-cent figure is calculated by comparing what all full-time females make with what all full-time males make. It doesn’t take into consideration differences like the fact that men and women don’t all choose the same fields of employment, get the same levels of education, have the same amount of work experience or even work the same number of hours in a full-time work week.
Rosin said two economists who found a more “apples-to-apples” comparison accounting for many of those factors narrowed the gap to 91 cents to a dollar.
Writing for the Daily Beast, author Christina Hoff Sommers showed that there were higher percentages of men who pursued degrees in nine of the ten most lucrative college majors (including many kinds of engineering), while women outnumbered men in nine of the ten least lucrative majors, including social work and early childhood education. These differences were based on personal choices.
Yet, the left persists in claiming there is a discrimination-based waged gap. Obama wasn’t alone in this. The liberal media, comedians, MSNBC pundits and many others have promoted the equal pay charade for years. Here are just five absurd examples:
1. Mika Brzezinski Likens Equal Pay Event to ‘Church Revival’
Fawning over the president or falling for meritless talking points are nothing new for MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski. But the liberal co-host of Morning Joe got positively carried away in April 2014, following a “fun” White House equal pay for women event.
She described it saying, “It was sort of like a church revival. I’m telling you, every time the president made a comment about why women should be paid equally to men. Equal pay for equal work, talking about the same jobs. You’d hear like, ‘OK,’ clapping, and almost like ‘praise Jesus.’”
2. Chris Matthews Ad for MSNBC Says Liberty Bell Rang for ‘Equal Pay’
MSNBC host Chris Matthews clearly needs to brush up on his American history, and not with Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
The Founding Fathers had independence from the British and likely religious freedom on the mind when they supposedly rang the Liberty Bell on July 8, 1776.
But to Matthews, the bell represented so much more. In a June 2014, Lean Forward advertisement for MSNBC he connected “equal pay” and “marriage equality” to “founding principles.”
“Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Unalienable rights that can never be taken away, the founding principles of our country, never to be amended,” Matthews said. “No, it was the country that would need to be amended through strong argument and civil war and long campaigns for civil and voting rights, for women’s suffrage, for equal pay and marriage equality. Those founding principles resonate as loudly today as when the Liberty Bell rang forth in 1776.”
3. $10 Million Comedian Sarah Silverman Complains about ‘Vagina Tax,’ Say’s ‘I’m Becoming a Dude’
Comedian Sarah Silverman joined the left-wing National Women’s Law Center’s Equal Payback Project in October 2014. She released an explicit and vulgar satirical ad about her getting a sex change operation in order to get paid the same as a man.
“Women make up almost half of the working population, yet we typically earn 78 cents to every dollar a man makes in almost every profession. Like doctors, lawyers, teachers, miners, and even the oldest profession of them all: tailors,” Silverman said, repeating the false “78 cent” statistic.
Later she said that over a woman’s entire life, “that’s a $500,000 vagina tax.” So her drastic solution, would be to get a sex change. In the explicit version, which was 3 minutes and 47 seconds long, she discussing picking out the right male genitalia. That version was too vulgar for MSNBC, which only aired a shorter cleaner version on October 8, 2014.
But even without a sex change the comedian and actress is worth $10 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth, more than three times the net worth of fellow comedian John Oliver, a man.
4. Networks Promote Patricia Arquette’s Oscar Plea for ‘Wage Equality’
Millionaire actress Patricia Arquette made headlines not only for her 2015 Oscar win for Boyhood, but also for the political rant she made during her acceptance speech.
Arquette’s demand for “wage equality once and for all” and “equal rights for women” in the U.S. made it on to all three broadcast evening shows the day after the Oscars, but CBS actually propped up her argument.
CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley said the actress who is worth $24 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth, “used the national stage as a soapbox.” Rather than pointing out how misleading wage gap claims are, Pelley said “she has a point” and turned to liberals to prove it.
Reporter Jericka Duncan followed up with a one-sided story that repeated the 78 cents on the dollar claim using Census Bureau data and cited a study from the left-wing American Association of University Women that also complained women earn “less than their male counterparts.” She also turned to a research firm for further support, but included no one with an opposing view.
Duncan concluded on a dismal note saying, “If this wage disparity continues at this rate, experts say we won’t see equality for women until 2058.”
5. CBS Hypes Feminist Attack on ‘Pay Gap,’ ‘Pale Males’
The networks’ certainty regarding the existence of a pay gap goes back years. In September 2013, CBS and ABC both considered it “ridiculous” that anyone would disagree.
CBS This Morning interviewed feminists Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda for a one-sided diatribe on the subject. That morning Norah O’Donnell claimed, “Last year women earned 76.5 cents to every dollar a man makes. Why does that still exist?”
Steinem claimed it was because women “are the cheap labor source on which the country is running.” Another left-wing guest Robin Morgan attacked the “pale males” who run the media.
Fonda was there too, agreeing with Steinem as she urged women to “sue,” to “bring action.” Fonda also complained that there were more men in the media business than women.
Joseph Rossell contributed to this article.
— Julia A. Seymour is Assistant Managing Editor for MRC Business at the Media Research Center. Follow Julia A. Seymour on Twitter.
