The 77-Cent Gender Wage Gap Is a Statistical Sham

For decades politicians have pushed a wage-gap myth that collapses under the slightest scrutiny. It’s time to retire it for good.

Americans are told that women earn just 77 cents for every dollar men make. It is repeated in classrooms, boardrooms, and political speeches as though it were gospel truth. It is not. It is a statistical sham, and perpetuating it is intellectually lazy and misleading.

Here’s the reality: the 77-cent figure is calculated by averaging the earnings of all "full-time" working women and men, regardless of occupation, hours, experience, or education. It lumps John the surgeon, who works 65 hours a week and earns $250,000, with Sally the dog walker, who works 35 hours a week and earns $24,000. Averaging these numbers together tells you absolutely nothing about equal pay for equal work.

Yet politicians, activists, and media outlets present this number as proof that women are systematically underpaid. They are not. Adjust for hours, occupation, experience, and education, and the so-called gap disappears. The 77-cent figure is not evidence of widespread discrimination; it is a misleading average designed to provoke outrage.

Consider this: Jane the lawyer earns $120,000. Mike the accountant earns $80,000. Anna the retail clerk earns $20,000. Mix them together, call it a “wage gap,” and suddenly you have a figure that sounds like injustice, even though no two people are being paid differently for the same work. Teaching young women that this statistic proves they are systematically cheated is reckless and dishonest.

If we truly care about workplace fairness, we should start with the facts: it has been illegal since 1963 to pay women less than men for the same work. The Equal Pay Act and subsequent laws give women every right to sue if they are cheated. That’s why the “77 cents” claim is so dishonest—it implies that millions of employers are breaking the law in broad daylight. They are not. What actually explains most differences in earnings are choices in occupation, hours, and experience—not some shadowy conspiracy of corporate America underpaying women en masse.

It is time to retire the 77-cent myth once and for all. It is absurd, misleading, and intellectually indefensible. We don’t need “solutions” to explain why a an engineer earns more than a cashier—we need honesty. Pay differences reflect differences in jobs, skills, responsibilities, and hours. That is normal. Pretending otherwise is nonsense, and repeating the 77-cent claim only confuses the public and insults their intelligence.

The 77-cent figure is not just a myth; it is a deception. And the longer we repeat it, the longer we deny women the respect of the truth.