Blake Masters/Gage Sizemore/Flickr
Opinion: Senate hopeful Blake Masters says there’s no such thing as a gender pay gap. Apparently, we women would do just fine if only we all went to Alaska and fished for crab.
By Laurie Roberts | Arizona Republic
Women of the world, rejoice.
All those years you thought you were making less money than the guys who do the same job as you?
Turns out you’re the victim not of a gender pay disparity but of a “fake left-wing narrative”, according to Blake Masters, one of several Arizona Republicans hoping to upend Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly this fall.
Masters is a 35-year-old venture capitalist, a political neophyte who is hoping to ride his mentor Peter Thiel’s millions into the U.S. Senate. He has spent much time of late explaining to us mere women that we have no constitutional right to abortion or contraception (though, thankfully, he assures us he’s not looking to outlaw condoms).
‘Men do the most dangerous jobs,’ Masters said
Now, in video aired on Wednesday by NBC’s Vaughn Hillyard, Masters explains why there’s no need to spell out in the Constitution that we should have equal rights to men.
“Women are not paid less in America than men,” Masters said, during a February candidate forum in Scottsdale. “It’s a left-wing narrative, this gender pay gap. When you control for the occupations, when you control for people taking time out to, you know, birth children, things are actually pretty equal. And men do the most dangerous jobs.”
Like, for example, explaining to women how we are paid really, really well, given who we are and what we do?
Masters just kept digging.
“Men are the ones who are doing risky, you know, fishing crab in Alaska,” he explained, during that Feb. 4 forum. “And sometimes those jobs pay more. Sometimes those jobs pay more, and so I think we got to push back on the fake left-wing narrative that women don’t have equal rights in this country.”
Meanwhile, here in the real world, study after study shows that while the gender pay gap has narrowed over time, it still exists and has hasn’t budged in the last 15 years. That’s no small thing when you’re a single mom who has to work an extra 42 days just to match the salary of a male co-worker.
Or longer, if you’re a woman of color.
Gender pay gap is shrinking, but it still exists
Women earned 84% of what men earned in 2020, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full- and part-time workers.
