I study gender issues. Sometimes this means research, sometimes means researching the research.  So there I was, reading about the wage gap in Washington State as per the Dept of Labor. The headline was in bold. Women wage 87c for the $1 of men. So I looked at the charts, the graphs, the bullet points and the breakdowns. I’m game. I had thought the wage gap was a feminist lie just to vilify men and I was very available to be corrected. I’m interested in The truth, not My truth. I saw that the wage gap was actually larger between white women and black women than between all men and All women. That’s odd, but then I realized that most black women were holding down more than 1part time job, and these statistics are only full time stats. So anyone working 50 hours a week in three different part time jobs was not in the data. Well, that would, or could mean a wider gap, not smaller. So I wondered who came up with this stuff anyway. it wasn’t the state of Washington. It was a private consulting firm. I won’t name them because of the elephants are afraid of the liability. But the mission statement was right there on their website. It’s an all women business with the stated goal of promoting women. Aha! This explains why the bold print said women earned less than men but obfuscated the larger gap between women. It’s important to point out that Washington State got a sizable kickback for hiring this All Women All The Time consulting firm, which it would not have gotten from say, a men owned firm. Like I say, the truth is all the facts and all the factors. So all the data is unreliable? No way to tell. The interpretation, the conclusions, were definitely untrustworthy. And they still are.

So I randomly chose a profession and researched it for Gender Wage Gap data. Dentistry. This is a reasonable choice, there are both men and women dentists, and dental assistants, hygienists, and the gender of clients is fairly split. What do we find? Nope. Sorry, no wage gap. Actually the opposite. Women dentists make less because they spend less time at work, and they are less likely to work overtime, and less likely to have their own private practice. Women dentists who are also mothers, spend less and less time with the addition of each child. The dentist who are men, spend more time at work, more overtime and are much more likely to have their own practice. This is partly because the average age difference, but what is interesting is that the dentists who are also fathers spend more time with each addition to their families. As you can see, this means that dad gets less time with the kids, while mom gets more. Since dentists do marry outside of their profession, there are surely other factors to collect. Either way, the Gender Wage Gap is looking more like the Catholic church after the invention of the telescope. The world is not flat and it is not the center of the universe.

Fair is fair so I thought I would see if the IRS could save the Wage Gap fantasy.

Nope. There too the data turned against the feminist dream of being unfairly oppressed too. The IRS report that men pay 60% more in personal  income taxes than women, and twice as much in business income taxes. wait, what? The wage gap is only a fifth of that. The men should be paying tax on $1 and women should be paying tax on 87 cents. The tax rate is nongendered so how can this be possible? Men are paying more it taxes, and by a lot. The Gendered Tax Gap just ate the wage gap, big time. So there is a problem, Houston. Not only is the Wage Gap a spoof, the real Gap is the other way. But how??! Intersectional feminism says the patriarchy hurts men too. Ok but what about all that tax money? Oh, it’s paying for the Affirmative Action policy which got that all women all the time consulting gig for the Washington State Dept of Labor! So my only question is, what are you doing for Fathers Day? I think I will go to the Dentist.