Gaps

Sowell has an article recently raising a question of what he calls the  "honesty gap" when the topic of gender based "earnings gap" is discussed. One example he offers is the earnings gap among physicians.
"Innumerable studies, going back decades, show that women do not average as many hours of work per year as men, do not have as many consecutive years of full-time employment as men, do not work in the same mix of occupations as men and do not specialize in the same mix of subjects in college as men.
Back in 1996, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed young male physicians earned 41% higher incomes than young female physicians. But the same study showed young male physicians worked over 500 hours a year more than young female physicians.
When the study took into account differences in hours of work, in the fields in which male and female doctors specialized and other differences in their job characteristics, "no earnings difference was evident.""

Women's wages are not simply a matter of comparing them to men's. Women live more complicated lives. Women, for a number of reasons, work less hours than men, have more career interruptions than men and have developed less seniority. When these elements are included in analysis, there is no gap. And every analyst knows this. The question is, why does the antagonism over the distinctions continue?