Chutzpah, thy name is Megan Rapinoe. After losing 5-2 in 2017 to the Dallas FC Under-15 squad — yes, that would be boys with, in certain cases, high-pitched voices — Rapinoe and the rest of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team (USWNST) still want the men’s money.
The scene of Rapinoe’s latest descent into utter audacity was the White House, where Joe and Jill Biden had a roundtable discussion with USWNST members on Wednesday, which was “Equal Pay Day.”
For the uninitiated, know that this day isn’t devoted to equalizing the pay gap between whites and Asian-descent Americans (the latter make more), between Christians and Jews, between uncompensated pubescent boy soccer players and the wealthy female pros they beat, or any other groups. Rather, discriminating among the disparity phenomena, the focus is on just a specific one: the gap between men and women.
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Moreover, because this aim isn’t confined to the soccer realm but is applied to the general population, it actually hurts women (more on that later). As NBC News reports (and distorts):
Wednesday marked “Equal Pay Day” — which is how far into the year women must work on average to make up the pay disparity between what men and women earned the prior year. The Census Bureau estimates that a woman working full-time would earn about 82 cents for each dollar paid to a man.
Biden and his wife, Jill, hosted a roundtable with Margaret Purce and Megan Rapinoe of the U.S. women’s national soccer team, and other members of the squad who attended virtually. The president then signed a proclamation honoring the day.
“Doesn’t matter if you’re an electrician, an accountant or part of the best damn soccer team in the world,” Biden said. “The pay gap is real. And this team is living proof that you can be the very best at what you do and still have to fight for equal pay.”
For the record, the “best damn soccer team in the world” would be, at least according to the current FIFA rankings, the Belgian men’s team. Speaking of which, there’s a good answer for the USWNST, whose Rapinoe told Biden, “I’ve been devalued, I’ve been disrespected and dismissed because I’m a woman.” To wit: If you want the men’s money, there’s a very simple way to get it.
Play in the men’s league and succeed.
(Or they could just beg for it; they are used to spending time on their knees, after all.)
I mean, really, isn’t this what you’d tell a lightweight boxer who complained that he wanted the heavyweights’ money?
Biden shouldn’t think this would be difficult for the USWNST, either, as on Equal Pay Day he said the below.
(My, so now, after watching the above, we know that Biden even lies to his daughters.)
Of course, NBC is right about one thing: The intersex pay gap is real. This is just as is the white/Asian-descent-American pay gap and the other aforementioned ones. And as with them, it has nothing to do with unjust discrimination.
In fact, Biden’s bunkum has been debunked so many times that doing so gets tiresome. It’s also shameful that politicians, even now, would still peddle such propaganda.
In 2014, I addressed the pay gap issue in The New American essay “Equal Pay for Equal Work Means Paying Men More.” Columnist Carrie Lukas also tackled the matter, back in 2007, and what she reported is as true today as it was then. She wrote:
All the relevant factors that affect pay — occupation, experience, seniority, education and hours worked — are ignored [by those citing the wage gap]. This sound-bite statistic fails to take into account the different roles that work tends to play in men’s and women’s lives.
In truth, I’m the cause of the wage gap — I and hundreds of thousands of women like me. I have a good education and have worked full time for 10 years. Yet throughout my career, I’ve made things other than money a priority. I chose to work in the nonprofit world because I find it fulfilling. I sought out a specialty and employer that seemed best suited to balancing my work and family life. When I had my daughter, I took time off and then opted to stay home full time and telecommute. I’m not making as much money as I could, but I’m compensated by having the best working arrangement I could hope for.
Women make similar trade-offs all the time. Surveys have shown for years that women tend to place a higher priority on flexibility and personal fulfillment than do men, who focus more on pay. Women tend to avoid jobs that require travel or relocation, and they take more time off and spend fewer hours in the office than men do.
As for the occupation factor, note that women generally choose less lucrative fields in the first place, such as the soft sciences (e.g., psychology) as opposed to the hard ones (e.g., STEM).
Oh, and for those chalking this up to “sexist” conditioning, that notion was debunked by credible scientific studies, as presented in the fine Norwegian documentary The Gender Equality Paradox (summary below).
In fact, researchers point out that women are actually less likely to enter typically masculine fields (e.g., engineering) in highly egalitarian nations such as Norway than in more patriarchal ones such as India. Why? Because in wealthy lands women have the luxury of following their hearts as opposed to having to struggle to survive — and their hearts lead them to things feminine.
In reality, whatever the pay disparity, it’s explainable by way of market forces: We all get compensated to the degree to which we satisfy others’ wants. (And, yes, “others” don’t always want what they should; hence Cardi B being a millionaire. But that’s a topic for a different day.)
This is why female fashion models out-earn their male counterparts threefold and why heavyweight boxers out-earn lightweights — and it’s why men earn more than women.
It’s also why male soccer players generally command more pay than female ones. Note here that the men bring in far more revenue.
So, technically, the USWNST doesn’t earn less because they lost to 14-year-old boys. But that reality does reflect why they earn less: The market is more interested in seeing the best than a lesser league.
Yet while ignoring most other pay disparities, the world’s Rapinoes want the government to trump the market when it benefits them. This not only smacks of greed, but actually hurts women. Why?
Well, remember, women have men as husbands and fathers. Now, if men get paid less because they have to subsidize the social-engineering dictated over-compensation of some female colleagues, they’ll be less able to support their families. This can force women who would otherwise choose to stay home to enter the workforce, thereby ripping them away from their sons and daughters.
Given that most women polled want to stay home with their children, it can thus hardly be said that equal-pay schemes “benefit women.” Instead, they undermine the family and, therefore, the very fabric of society.
They sure do, however, benefit demagogic politicians who play the feminist, divide-and-conquer card for power.
