Will young men be helped? New study says young women earn more than young men

The gender wage gap has been one of the talking points for a lot of liberals, economists and politicians. Constantly we are informed of how women earn 23 cents less than men and how there needs to be legislation to increase this. The data that support this claim has been widely refuted. It should also be noted that the figure is just based on one study. Since then, there have been a large number of other studies to discredit this notion (SEE: 9 statistics Patricia Arquette needs to read on gender wage gap myth).

But what if we were to find that men earned 23 cents less than woman? Would these same people call for the legislation to balance it out? Nope.

A new study finds that women earn on average more than men until they reach their 30s, a time when women decide to become mothers.

The Press Association used data from the United Kingdom’s Office of National Statistics and looked at women between the ages of 22 and 29 from the years 2006 to 2013. The result was that these young women earned about $1,700 more than their male counterparts. This number switches when both genders hit their 30s.

For instance, according to the report, a man who turned 30 in 2006 would earn on average $13,464 more than a woman by 2013.

Therefore, it can easily be concluded that there isn’t a nefarious plot to keep women down. There’s isn’t a sexist initiative going on. When a woman becomes a mother she has to take a lot of time off, which then also leads to their skills being out of date, among other things.

There are just so many factors to why some women earn less than men and vice versa: education, experience, laws of supply and demand, hours worked, marital/parental status and the list goes on.

Or, as Tim Worstall, senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute, writes in Forbes: “It’s obviously not gender discrimination because as above, women earn more than men before they have children. It’s thus the children, not the gender, which is the cause. And the two reasons put forward are maternity leave and personal preference.”

He concluded: “…the gender pay gap might not actually be a problem that needs solving at all, it’s just something our species does.”