Is Rachel Maddow sincere?

[HiPointDem]

47. the issue so far as the maddow report goes is that most of that difference can be explained

by differences in experience, skill, occupation, education or hours worked. As the quote Maddow used went on to explain. But she neglected to include that part.

Here's how the Census bureau does their comparison. They take a job category. They pull out all full-time workers and divide them into men & women. Then they average the incomes of both groups. That's how they get the "averages." The Bloomberg study is the *same* study using the *same* Census data, they just look at more finely-divided job categories.

The adjustments come in when you find that, on average, men in occupation X have e.g. more years of experience, work more hours, etc. And this is perfectly understandable because women are more likely than men to take a career break for child-rearing, to work fewer hours because of child-care responsibilities, to be supported by spouses for some period, etc.

This is not discrimination by employers, it's a cultural fact. It may be problematic but it's not the blatant discrimination Maddow keeps harping on.

I watched the clip. In the first half Maddow keeps beating at the 77% statistic in a completely black & white way. She spends several minutes talking about discrimination, especially by republican legislators, as if discrimination were the only relevant fact relating to these statistics & if non-discrimination in hiring and pay were not *already* the law of the land, at both federal and state levels.

When a male guest tries to talk about the adjustments, she cuts him off with her repetitious "women get paid less for doing the same work." But it's not so black & white as she insists, & she's smart enough to know that. So I call her dishonest on this matter.

In the second half she discusses the adjustments with a female guest, but in a quite dishonest way intended to blur the fact that adjustments reduce that 23% gap *significantly* and to leave the impression that blatant discrimination is the main reason for the gap.

To give you an example of the misleading way the adjustments are discussed, Dr. Hartmann refers to a GAO study and says "Even when you put everything into the regression analyses to make that gap go away, you still can't explain 20% of it."

The impression the casual listener will get is that even after adjustments there's still an inexplicable 20% gap. But that's not what the GAO study found. 20% of 23% = 4.6%, i.e. 5%. The portion of the wage gap that can't be explained = about 5%.

But most viewers will go away with an entirely different impression, especially after Hartmann & Maddow spend the end of the hour harping on discrimination.

Another fact: the lower you go down the wage scale, the smaller the wage gap between male & female workers. The "gap" is largest among the most privileged classes, and that also makes sense: because women in those classes are more likely to have the privilege of taking time off, then jumping back into their careers -- still at excellent salaries, though not as excellent as they would have had had they not taken the break.

Upper-class women are also most likely to work in the areas where pay can be fiddled to accomodate "stars". Much less the case in low-wage work and most public sector work. Or in low to mid-level women-dominated fields like child-care and teaching.

Maddow is an upper-class woman & the issues she is passionate about are those that reflect her class interests.

At the lower end of the wage scale, pay equality takes a back seat to low pay generally (for both men & women), job destruction, etc.

e.g. public sector workers and public school teachers are under attack, both sectors women dominated & with a higher percentage of minority women than others. How many times has Maddow done a good piece on these trends compared to her pieces on wage differentials, war on women, etc.?

I haven't watched her much, but I've never seen her focus on these kind of issues, or on specifically class issues.