Guy With An Economics Degree Explains The Gender Pay Gap In Less Than A Minute

American political commentator Dennis Prager is the founder of PragerU, a non-profit organization that creates videos on various political, economic, and philosophical topics from a conservative perspective.

One of the subjects PragerU tackles is the gender pay gap. The organization has released material claiming it didn't exist as early as 2017, but when it took its views to TikTok, it was met with great resistance.

One of the people who opposed PragerU was James Ray. Drawing from the things he learned while pursuing a degree in economics, Ray published a response to the organization, attacking their main claim on the subject—if women were paid less than men, businesses would hire only women.

James told Bored Panda that he chose to get a degree in economics because he wanted to go into investment management. However, once he became more left-leaning, he realized just how valuable this "tool" was—it helped him contextualize the theory he read and explain better to people how some reforms and changes can materially benefit them. "Basically, it just made it easier for me to educate people on disparities present in our society," he said.

"I had heard of Dennis Prager well before the TikTok because of Prager U (he's sort of a well-known right-wing ideologue and propagandist)," James said. "And I do not like him. He spews very hateful unfounded rhetoric to his audience and I think the disinformation and overall problematic nature of his content have made me dislike him considerably!"

"My TikTok received an overall very good response, but like anything political, there's always a cohort of people trying their best to disagree publicly," Ray explained. "I'd say overall though I have seen a lot of good feedback!"

However, Prager hasn't. In fact, he has already deactivated his account, and this particular video may have contributed to it as well.

"As far as his attention from other TikTokers, I think it's been mostly negative," James said. "TikTok is... not fun for conservatives but particularly not for those like Dennis and I think the overall political TikTok community response has been a mixture of either attacking and mocking him and his positions or outright ignoring him so as to not give him attention."

According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the presence of alternative ways to measure the gender pay gap is one of the reasons for the misconception that data on the gender wage gap is unreliable. However, the data is remarkably clear and (unfortunately) consistent about the scale of the gap. "One often-cited statistic comes from the Census Bureau, which looks at annual pay of full-time workers," the EPI wrote. "By that measure, women are paid 80 cents for every dollar men are paid."

"Another measure looks at hourly pay and does not exclude part-time workers. It finds that, relative to men, typical women are paid 83 cents on the dollar. Other less-cited measures show different gaps because they examine the gap at different parts of the wage distribution, or for different demographic subgroups, or are adjusted for factors such as education level and occupation."

There's no going around it; the gender pay gap is a thing. Why does it still exist is a question for another time. However, at least it looks like things are getting better.

A 2005 meta-analysis by Doris Weichselbaumer and Rudolf Winter-Ebmer of more than 260 published pay gap studies for over 60 countries found that from the 1960s to the 1990s, raw (aka non-adjusted) wage differentials worldwide have fallen substantially from around 65% to 30%. The bulk of this decline was due to better labor market endowments of women (i.e. better education, training, and work attachment).

But we still have a long way to go. According to the 2018 report from the World Economic Forum, it will take more than 200 years for economic gender equality to emerge, and 108 years to completely close the global gender gap across politics, health, and education. And people like Dennis Prager aren't helping.