Matthew Lau: If women really are paid so much less, why would anyone hire men?

According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), there’s a gender wage gap in Ontario of 29.4 per cent between men and women. Because this can only be attributable to discrimination against women, the left-wing CCPA’s recent report on the matter calls for a transformation of the labour market to fix it. The Toronto Star agrees, editorializing that “Ontario needs a step-by-step plan to close the wage gap.”

Sexism isn’t the only thing to blame, the CCPA is careful to note. So are many other things that advocates of big government find loathsome: the alleged austerity agenda, the decline of unionization, and the “declining equality role of governments,” among other things. So the cure to the gender wage gap, one is left to infer, is the same medicine the left prescribes for any complaint: more government spending, more powerful unions, and maybe some societal re-education to eradicate our sexist ways. It’s a surprise they didn’t throw in a need for more wind power too, by somehow finding a way to blame the wage gap on global warming as well.

In reality, the reason women make less than men is that, on average, their productive output is lower — primarily because they tend to work fewer hours. According to the Ontario Ministry of Labour, the hourly wage gap is only 11.9 per cent. And controlling for education, experience, job tenure, job type, age, and other factors would likely make that remaining wage gap disappear. Of course, these factors must be controlled for all at once. Controlling for only one factor at a time, as the CCPA does in its analysis, is useful for very little except misleading the public on the wage-gap issue...