“How many times have you heard that ‘women are paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men’? Barack Obama said it during his last campaign. Women’s groups say it every April 9, which is Equal Pay Day. In preparation for Labor Day, a group protesting outside Macy’s this week repeated it, too, holding up signs and sending out press releases saying ‘women make $.77 to every dollar men make on the job.’ I’ve heard the line enough times that I feel the need to set the record straight: It’s not true. The point here is not that there is no wage inequality. But by focusing our outrage into a tidy, misleading statistic we’ve missed the actual challenges.”
