John Leo

During one of the presidential debates, John Kerry complained that full-time working men made a dollar for every 76 cents paid to women for the same work. President Bush didn't challenge the statement, and reporters let it go by as well.

"The average woman is cheated out of about $250,000 in wages over a lifetime," according to an article in Ms. Magazine.

Oh, really? The Census Bureau did find that women earned 76 cents for every dollar paid to a male (now up to 80 cents on the dollar), but that was a raw number, not adjusted for comparable jobs and responsibility. Warren Farrell's new book, Why Men Earn More, goes further, examining a broad array of wage statistics.

His conclusion: When reasonable adjustments are made, women earn just as much as men, and sometimes more.

Some of his findings:

•Women are 15 times as likely as men to become top executives in major corporations before the age of 40.

•Never-married, college-educated males who work full time make only 85 percent of what comparable women earn.

•Female pay exceeds male pay in more than 80 fields, 39 of them large fields that offer good jobs, including financial analyst, engineering manager, sales engineer, statistician, surveying and mapping technicians, agricultural and food scientists and aerospace engineers.

•A female investment banker's starting salary is 116 percent of a male's.

•Part-time female workers make $1.10 for every $1 earned by part-time males.

Mr. Farrell argues that comparable males and females have been earning similar salaries for decades, though the media have yet to notice. As long ago as the early 1980s, he writes, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that companies paid men and women equal money when their titles and responsibilities were the same.

In 1969, data from the American Council on Education showed that female professors who had never been married and had never published earned 145 percent of their male counterparts. Even during the 1950s, Mr. Farrell says, the gender pay gap for all never-married workers was less than 2 percent.

Citing Internal Revenue statistics, Mr. Farrell notes that women who own their own businesses net only 49 percent of what male counterparts make. Since it can't be that male bosses are holding them back here, women seem to be seeking certain lifestyle trade-offs – forgoing the highest possible income for more free time and flexible hours.

Mr. Farrell argues that many men outearn women by a willingness to take risky and dangerous jobs, as well as work that exposes them to stress and bad weather, or that requires a transfer to an undesirable location. Women are more likely than men to pick glamorous jobs that tend to pay less.

Much of Mr. Farrell's book is written in the style of a self-help book. It lists 25 ways women can improve their earnings, 10 of them advising the careful selection of high-paying fields and subfields. In nursing, an anesthesiology nurse can make more than the average doctor. An Army therapist is better paid than many other therapists.

Mr. Farrell was a board member of the National Organization for Women in the early 1970s but broke with the movement over its anti-male excesses. He believes that the academic world and the news media have been incurious custodians of the myth that male oppression prevents women from achieving equal pay.

It's a sturdy myth, and data that contradict it are typically buried or never updated. Given the current campus climate, no honest academic study of women's pay is possible today.

Mr. Farrell bluntly advises women to put the victimization rhetoric on hold and just do what it takes to get the high-paying jobs. Good idea.

John Leo's column is distributed by Universal Press Syndicate. His e-mail address is jleo@usnews.com.

Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/s/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/031905dnedileo.e953.html