Story at a glance
- Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters in newly released footage from a February event said the gender pay gap in the U.S. is a “left-wing narrative.”
- Masters said women are “not paid less than men” because men do more “dangerous jobs” that often “pay more.”
- Most research contradicts Masters’ claims, and the gender pay gap hasn’t markedly improved over the last 15 years, according to a Pew Research Center report published last year.
An Arizona Republican Senate candidate recently waved off the existence of a gender pay gap in the U.S., arguing that the measure is merely a myth perpetuated by Democrats and when controlling for “dangerous” jobs that are mostly held by men, “things are actually pretty equal.”
“Women are not paid less in America than men,” Blake Masters, who is running to unseat Sen. Mark Kelly (D), says in video footage from a February candidates forum in Scottsdale, Arizona that was obtained and first reported by NBC News this week.
“It’s a left-wing narrative, this gender pay gap,” Masters says during the forum while arguing against the need for the Equal Rights Amendment, which would prohibit sex-based discrimination. “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.”
“Men are the ones who are doing risky, you know, fishing crab in Alaska,” Masters adds. “And sometimes those jobs pay more.”
Similar claims have been made by the conservative Canadian psychologist Jordan Petersen.
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Masters then tells the audience that the nation needs to “push back on the fake left-wing narrative that women don’t have equal rights in this country.”
Masters’ campaign did not immediately respond to Changing America’s request for comment, but Masters on Twitter this week said a “gaggle” of media outlets had been “attacking” him over his comments.
“Except everyone knows I am right,” Masters, whose candidacy has been backed by billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, wrote.
Most research contradicts Masters’ claims, and a Pew Research Center report published last year found that the gender pay gap in the U.S. has remained relatively stable over the last 15 years, with women in 2020 earning just 84 percent of what men earned. Based on that estimate, it would take an extra 42 days of work for women to earn the same amount of money as their male counterparts, according to Pew.
The American Association of University Women, a Boston-based nonprofit advancing equity for women and girls, estimates that at the current rate of progress, the gender pay gap won’t close until at least 2111.
Another Pew report published in March found that young women are out-earning men in a handful of metro areas, although, historically, women do not maintain their wage gains as they age.
Women between the ages of 16 and 29 earned 88 percent of similarly-aged men in 2000, according to Pew, but those same women earned only 80 percent of what their male peers made by 2019, when they were between 35 and 48 years old.
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