232. The True Story of the Gender Pay Gap

[0] Oh, hi.

[1] I'm Sarah Silverman, writer, comedian, and vagina owner.

[2] Women make up almost half the working population, yet we typically earn just 78 cents to every dollar a man makes in almost every profession.

[3] I'm pretty sure you've heard this kind of statistic before.

[4] Maybe in a political ad?

[5] The gender wage gap is real, and women still earn about 77 cents for every dollar a man or a man or a woman.

[6] for working the same job.

[7] Maybe even in a State of the Union address.

[8] Today, women make up about half our workforce, but they still make 77 cents for every dollar of man earns.

[9] That is wrong.

[10] And in 2014, it's an embarrassment.

[11] Women deserve equal pay for equal work.

[12] The implication is that women are being discriminated against.

[13] True, they earn less, but does that mean that women are receiving lower pay?

[14] for equal work.

[15] That is possibly the case in certain places, but by and large, it's not that.

[16] It's something else.

[17] Something else?

[18] Like what?

[19] That's our question of the day on Freakonomics Radio, as we try to figure out the true story of the gender pay gap.

[20] From WNYC Studios, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything.

[21] Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

[22] you're looking for someone to explain the gender pay gap.

[23] You couldn't do much better than today's guest.

[24] Chloe Golden, I'm a professor of economics at Harvard University.

[25] Golden has been working on gender economics for years and has personally done some of the most influential research.

[26] So I define my role by thinking about the issues of today and putting them in historical perspective and understanding what their roots are because until you see the more distant past, you really don't know whether you're looking at something that's a little ephemeral transitory blip or something that's important.

[27] And how important is it for you to get hold of good data in order to reach those conclusions?

[28] It's sort of essential.

[29] I always say that I do not live in a data vacuum.

[30] I find it very hard to breathe in a data vacuum.

[31] In 1990, Claudia Golden became the first woman to get tenure in the Harvard Economics Department.

[32] In 2014, she served as president of the American Economic Association, the AEA.

[33] Her lecture at the annual AEA meeting was called A Grand Gender Convergence, its last chapter.

[34] You have argued, and I'll quote you to yourself, the converging roles of men and women...