Important headlines for April 11th – Florida's Gender pay gap

Important headlines for April 11th – Florida's Gender pay gap 

Bottom Line: These are stories you don't want to miss and my hot takes on them...   

  • Florida women earn 87 cents on every dollar men earn, new report says - Sun Sentinel 

Hot Take: It's not what the report says that's the issue. It's what it doesn't say that is. Yes, if you just take the pay of women and men in the workforce and compare the two you'll find the 13% disparity in Florida and disparity as high as 30% in Louisiana and Utah. Here's the thing is completely false reporting given the intended delivery of the information. The way this is presented is in an effort to support a narrative that women are discriminated against in the workplace. While rare and isolated cases are real - it's not at all what this is about. Here's a fact of God that even the most ardent scientists haven't been unable to undo yet. Women have children. Men do not. As long as children are birthed they'll have to be accounted for by the mother's birthing them and commonly taking time away from work to do so. I could make this complicated, but it doesn't need to be.  

Florida's 13 cent disparity in pay is tied for the lowest nationally. Florida has the sixth lowest birthrate nationally. Utah has the largest disparity and they have the highest birth rate nationally. In other words, we see direct connections between birth rates and pay and career decisions that impact income. Previous research has shown that when you only look at men and women at equitable points in a career with similar production women earn 97% of what men earn and even then, much of the three percent can be explained by men being far more likely to negotiate salary than women (rather than an institutionalized bias). There are two sides to every story but one side to facts. In the case of the gender pay gap it's absolutely wrong for discrimination if/when it occurs. That's not what's behind the significant gaps discussed in this and related studies. It's comparing apples and oranges or in this case men who most commonly remain in career positions advancing consistently compared with women who become mothers and often put their careers on hold for a period of time in the process.   

Excerpt: Johnson is also a Democrat and has been aligned for decades with the Clintons, both as a political supporter and major player in the Clinton Foundation.  That partisan background did not, however, prevent him from speaking his mind and heaping praise on President Trump’s economic accomplishments, especially the results for black Americans.  

On CNBC, he celebrated not only the fact that black unemployment hit an all-time low but also the narrowing unemployment spread between whites and blacks.  He praised the Trump tax cuts as creating an economy that is “soliciting employees who have been out of the labor force.” 

Hot Take: This is a critical point and something that's little known and seldom discussed. It also is exactly why I breakout a three-part series every month to deliver the "real unemployment rate" and the demographics behind them. Consider that just this month the base unemployment rate didn't show any improvement. However, the "real" rate, the one that factors in the long term unemployed, underemployed and marginally attached showed improvement of 500,000 people last month that otherwise would have gone unnoticed in basic government numbers. Important to this black unemployment rate...while comprising only around 12% of the workforce, nearly half of those 500k jobs were obtained by black adults last month. Further to the point, while the base black unemployment rate appeared unchanged, I illustrated that the real unemployment rate for black adults reached a new all-time low last month as a result. For those who truly care about progress over politics, such as the first black billionaire, Robert Johnson - Donald Trump's policies have created more progress for black adults in the labor market than any other president this side of Lincoln inside of a year. Again there are two sides to stories but this once again is a demonstrable fact.  

Until tomorrow...      


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