PHOENIX — Yesterday, a new op-ed by Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts outlined the absurdity of California tech bro Blake Masters — whose campaign is almost entirely bankrolled by his Big Tech billionaire benefactor Peter Thiel — arguing that the gender pay gap does not exist.
The column follows NBC News releasing a video of Blake Masters calling the gender pay gap a “left-wing narrative” and arguing men make more simply because they do the “most dangerous jobs.”
See below for key excerpts from the op-ed:
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).
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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.”
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“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.
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I put in a call to Masters on Thursday, hoping to talk to him about his views on the apparently non-existent gender gap and where he gets his information. If he gets back to me, I’ll update.
While we wait, consider that the median salary for Arizona men was $50,068 in 2020, according to the Census Bureau. Women, meanwhile, earned just $41,617.