If you're thinking about going to a liberal arts college you might want to be a little careful about going to UM at Amherst. Well, you might want to be careful if you decide you want to study economics while you're there at least. For one  of their professors has taken to the pages of the New York Times to tell us all about the gender pay gap. And managed to get parts of it quite spectacularly wrong. Take this for example:

A recent comparative analysis of 21 countries by two sociologists at the University of Washington, Becky Pettit and Jennifer Hook, reports that women’s labor-force participation tends to be lower in countries where their earnings relative to men are higher. For instance, in Germany and Italy, a smaller percentage of women work for pay than in the United States, but those who are employed earn more, on average, relative to men.  Women who overcome the obstacles to employment there tend to be high earners.

The facts are true but the explanation is absurd. Take the first part: where womens' pay is higher than mens' then fewer women work. How does that make sense in any economic manner? People respond to incentives. If women are making more than men then more will go to work. The clue is in the second part. Fewer women go to work....and that's the first stage.  And it isn't because women who "overcome the barriers" tend to be high achievers either. It's because only high achievers go to work. What we're actually seeing here is simply a statistical artifact. In countries like Germany and Italy (this is actually very strong in Germany as a social force) women with young children simply do not work. It's near unheard of. The exception is women who have, before marriage and or children, joined one of the professions. Even Germans understand that if you've sweated blood for a decade to become a doctor or lawyer then you're not going to give that up entirely because you've got a child or two. However, if your jobs was simply a job rather than one of the professions then it's considered entirely normal that you stop work when you have a child: and abnormal if you don't. All of which means that most of the women who are in hte labor force are women who are in hte professions. As you will have noted, the professions pay more than most other jobs: thus we see that on average womens' pay is higher than male. Not because women in every job get paid more than men. But because only the women in high paid jobs keep working after they've had children. It's nothing at all to do with high achievers persisting or anything else. It's purely because we're comparing women in professional jobs with all men: believe me, it isn't true that a female lawyer or female doctor gets paid more in Germany than her male counterpart. It's just that any doctor get more than a plumber. All of which would make me wary of studying economics at a college where that profe4ssor teaches.