We gave too little thought to the math of “Equal Pay Day” in our criticism of the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, concluding in the third-to last paragraph that “Equal Pay Day” in 2014 implied a 27-cent gender pay gap. Performed correctly, the equation shows a gap of about 21 cents.
To correct the item we deleted two grafs. We preserve those grafs below and apologize to any who were misled as a result of our mistake.
So let’s do the math. Equal Pay Day fell on April 8, 2014. That’s 98 days into the year. As a percentage of the entire year, that comes to about 27 percent. So the president is suggesting a 27-cent gender pay gap between women and men for doing the same work.
And Glenn Kessler thinks this is an improvement?
Correction Feb. 3, 2016: Deleted an extra “the” in the second paragraph. Hat tip to D2E for pointing out the error.
Pre-republication update July 23, 2025: Moving to Substack we leave old comments behind, but the Internet Archive has them.