Opinion: Not only is The Man sexist, so are parents: How to solve the ‘allowance pay gap’

Horrors! It turns out that not only do women earn only 77 cents for every man’s dollar — or something sort of like that — but it turns out that little boys make more money in the form of allowances from their parents than little girls make. Time for another federal program! No, make that another civil rights law!

According to a recent Junior Achievement survey: “Parents are more likely to give their sons an allowance than their daughters. Among all young people surveyed, 67 percent of boys compared with 59 percent of girls say they get an allowance from their parents.”

Isn’t that awful? And now, ThinkProgress’ Bryce Covert has uncovered even more gender-based iniquities visited on little girls by their parents and other sexist adults in their lives:

“But unfortunately, it’s not likely because boys do more chores. One study found that girls do two more hours of housework a week than boys, while boys spend twice as much time playing. The same study confirmed that boys are still more likely to get paid for what they do: they are 15 percent more likely to get an allowance for doing chores than girls. A 2009 survey of children ages 5 to 12 found that far more girls are assigned chores than boys. A study in Europe also found fewer boys contribute to work around the house,” writes Covert. “And it’s not just that boys are more likely to be paid by their parents, but they also get more money. One study found that boys spent just 2.1 hours a week on chores and made $48 on average, while girls put in 2.7 hours to make $45. A British study found that boys get paid 15 percent more than girls for the same chores. Young girls suffer a wage gap even when they leave their home in search of wages. Despite the fact that the vast majority of babysitters are girls, the few boys who take on those jobs have higher hourly rates.”

Girls make close to $17 an hour for doing chores? Why didn’t I have parents like that when I was growing up?

Time magazine’s Eliana Dockterman weighs in: “Before we dismiss these studies as cute — after all, we’re talking about money used to buy toys and candy — remember that this system reinforces the expectation that females won’t be paid as much as males for equal work, even at a young age. This could help explain why women earn less than men in all but 7 of of [sic] the nearly 600 occupations listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (A female physician, for example, earns 67 percent of her male counterpart’s paycheck.) Even when you remove factors like women taking time off or working part-time to raise children, an analysis by the Government Accountability Office found that women still earn around 80 percent of men’s wages.”

Dockterman continues: “This chore pay gap also demonstrates to girls that household work doesn’t count as work that should be rewarded. It’s no wonder then that when they grow up, women spend more than twice as much time on unpaid work (like childcare and household chores) as men do each week, while men find more time to relax.”

OK, I’ll take the “allowance wage gap” seriously too, just like Dockterman.

First of all, as Hanna Rosin has pointed out in Slate, citing a paper, “The Gender Pay Gap,” by Stanford economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn, you have to factor in the number of hours that men and women actually work per week, even when both sexes have full-time jobs (at least on paper) and may even hold the same job title. Women in general simply work fewer hours per week than men, and they congregate in professions where women predominate. Women physicians tend to choose specialties in which the hours are shorter and the work less grueling: pediatrics and family practice versus heart and brain surgery. Indeed, Blau and Kahn found that once you account for such differences — which are matters of personal choice — women actually earn 91% of what men earn.

Unless you want to have a federal bureaucracy mandating how much money every single person is allowed to earn, you have to live with the fact that many women simply don’t want to work as hard as many men.

Now, back to those kids: Kids shouldn’t get paid for doing chores, period. That would solve the “allowance wage gap” overnight.