I really like Rachel Maddow. And though some folks are touting this exchange on Meet the Press as a 'victory' of sorts, I think she lost. This is one big reason I teach a course for our Women's and Gender Studies program. Conservatives will use economics jargon and 'styling' to rip apart a lot of common lefty slogans, and we need to be better prepared.
"Women in this country still make 77 cents on the dollar for what men make." is exactly one of those slogans. Conservatives can dismiss the statement immediately, because it's an oversimplification. This oversimplification might make a nice bumper sticker, but it doesn't make a nice argument. And we don't need it. We can use facts to convincingly show what the 77 cents comment is meant to connote.
On Meet the Press, Castellanos mentioned that men choose higher-paying occupations and women want more flexibility in their schedules. Not all women want more flexibility, and there's a whole lotta pre-market discrimination that keeps women out of higher paying occupations. And...even within most occupations we see women earning less than men.
PoliticsUSA links to this report from the Center for American Progress. Well, that's fine, but anything from a think-tank is heavily influenced by that think-tank's agenda.
So, I'd rather look to the BLS report on women's earnings in 2007, which lists gender wage differentials for very detailed occupations, using data from the Current Population Survey (the same survey used to generate our unemployment rate). Within nearly every occupation, women earn less. Rachel didn't need to say 77% of all women, b/c it lets the conservatives rip her position apart. There's a wide range of differentials within occupations, but nearly all of them show women earning less for working full-time at the same job.
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