#WarOnWomen: NBC Now Claims That "Pay Gap" Even Extends to Girls' Allowances

Shockingly enough, this microaggression started out on the leftwing blog Think Progress and made it to NBC's airwaves in nothing flat.

A day after the liberal website Think Progress wrote a piece complaining “There’s Even A Gender Gap In Children’s Allowances” the folks over at NBC rushed to tie the issue to the “pay gap” between men and women.

On Thursday, April 24, Today show co-host Matt Lauer hyped “We all know about a pay gap that exists for adult men and women in the work world, but there are surprising new numbers this morning revealing that that gap actually begins during childhood with the allowances we pay our kids. In a new survey, 70% of boys say they get an allowance. That’s compared to just 60% of girls.”

Co-host Natalie Morales expressed shock at the so-called “pay gap” exists among children and complained “It’s true. Even though another study finds that girls spend more time doing chores. So basically, girls are doing more for less. This sounds kind of familiar right?"

This is based on a single survey by a group called "Junior Achievement."

By the way, NBC can't accurately report the numbers of this silly single poll. 59% of girls say they get an allowance, and 67% of boys. The differential (according to this silly poll) is 8%, not 10%, as they claim.

Shouldn't they sort of get simple numbers right?

Meanwhile, not only has socialist Sweden joined the #WarOnWomen, but they've been fighting it for years.

Consider Sweden, a country where the goal of gender parity is close to a national religion...

The results are not what anyone could call revolutionary.... [T]he difference in labor force participation is not dramatic, and in most respects, Swedish women behave much as sisters do in the U.S.

Like Americans, Swedish women work substantially fewer hours than men; they are 2 times as likely to be part timers. They are the vast majority of social workers, teachers, and child care workers and a small minority of scientists (PDF) and CEO’s (PDF). In fact, Sweden’s labor market is among the most sex segregated (PDF) in the world and their wage gap shows it. Mothers take in only about 20% as men, much the same as in the United States.

The results in other countries committed to gender role busting are much the same. Iceland has been crowned the most gender equal country in the world by the World Economic Forum (PDF) every year since 2009. They provide many of the same supports as Sweden. So does Norway, third on the WEF list and famous as the first country to institute a 40% female quota in corporate boardrooms. Women in both countries are well represented in parliament—about 40%. Yet the ladies still work fewer hours than their male counterparts and they are two times as likely to be part timers. They remain segregated in more traditionally “female” occupations. Their mommy wage gap? About the same as Sweden and the U.S.

posted by Ace at 12:37 PM

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