PolitiFact supports dishonest Democratic Party "war on women" meme

There's plenty wrong with PolitiFact's Oct. 28 fact check of a Facebook meme, but we'll focus this time only on PolitiFact's implicit support of Democrats' baseless "war on women" political attack strategy regarding equal pay for equal work.

The meme graphic looks like this:

The question at the end, "Share if you miss the good old days!" implies a contrast between today's Republican Party platform and the platform in 1956. For us, the relevant point is No. 7, "Assure equal pay for equal work regardless of sex." Democrats have made the supposed Republican "war on women" a main point of their campaigns, partly by criticizing Republican opposition of the Democrats' proposed "Paycheck Fairness Act," which places new burdens on businesses defending against pay discrimination lawsuits. Equal pay for equal work, of course, already stands as the law of the land.

PolitiFact, on its main page of fact checks, elevates the fake contrast on the equal pay issue to first place:

Image from PolitiFact.com, appropriated under Fair Use.

"What a difference 58 years makes."

Back in '56, Republicans supported equal pay for equal work. But today, PolitiFact implies, Republicans no longer support equal work for equal pay.

It's horrible and biased reporting that has no place in a fact check.

Are things better in the text of the story? Not so much (emphasis in the original):

The 2012 platform doesn’t mention two of the meme’s seven items from 1956 -- unemployment benefits and equal pay for women.

The bottom line, then, is that on most of these issues, the GOP moved to the right between 1956 and 2012, though the degree of that shift has varied somewhat issue by issue.

PolitiFact finds no evidence of a shift on equal pay other than the issue's absence in the 2014 GOP platform. But that only makes sense given that federal equal pay laws went on the books in the 1960s. So there's no real evidence of any shift other than a fallacious appeal to silence, yet we have "equal pay" as PolitiFact's lead example of the GOP's supposed move to the right.

The issue also gets top billing in PolitiFact's concluding paragraphs (bold emphasis added):

The meme says the 1956 Republican Party platform supported equal pay, the minimum wage, asylum for refugees, protections for unions and more.

That’s generally correct. However, it’s worth noting that other elements of the 1956 platform were considered conservative for that era. Also, some of the issues have changed considerably between 1956 and 2012, such as the shift from focusing on post-war refugees to focusing on illegal immigration.

There's really no need to mention anything in the fact check about federal equal pay legislation passing in the 1960s, right?

This type of journalism is exactly what one would predict if liberal bias affected the work of left-leaning journalists. This fact check serves as an embarrassment to the practice of journalism.

PolitiFact Wisconsin's version of the gender pay hack

Context matters – We examine the claim in the full context, the comments made before and after it, the question that prompted it, and the point the person was trying to make.
--"Principles of PolitiFact, PunditFact and the Truth-O-Meter"

It's often difficult to take seriously PolitiFact's claim that it examines context.  We have our latest example of this PolitiFailure via PolitiFact Wisconsin, on the subject of--what else?--the gender pay gap:

"Women deserve equal pay for equal work. It's just that simple," Burke, a Madison School Board member, said in an April 8, 2014 news release.

"In Wisconsin, a woman only earns 80 cents for every dollar a man earns--and pay discrimination doesn't just hurt our families, it hurts our economies, too."

What's so complicated about doing this fact check correctly?  If Democrat gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke is arguing that women deserve equal pay for equal work, then the statistic she's using is highly misleading.

PolitiFact Wisconsin explains why, in the same fact check:

In rating a number of pay-gap claims, we and our PolitiFact colleagues have found that wording is crucial. Two of those fact-checks help put Burke's claim into perspective.

Former Dane County executive Kathleen Falk, while campaigning for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination to challenge Walker in the 2012 recall election, said Wisconsin women "are paid 81 cents to the dollar of a man doing the same job."

The key phrase was "same job."

PolitiFact Wisconsin rated Falk's claim "False." And in rating similar claims before this year, PolitiFact gave them no higher than a "Mostly False" rating.

This year, however, the national PolitiFact gave President Obama a "Mostly True" for a claim closely parallel to Burke's. Apparently a Democrat politician can say it's important that we establish laws to help ensure equal pay for equal work--that's for men and women "doing the same job"--then throw in the statistic for men and women working full-time at different jobs and like magic the "Truth-O-Meter" rating rises to "Mostly True."

It's ridiculous.  This is an intentional deception.  PolitiFact overlooked it.  PolitiFact Oregon overlooked it.  And now PolitiFact Wisconsin has signed on to sell the Democratic Party's lie du jour.

The stat doesn't fit.  And if the stat doesn't fit, PolitiFact must acquit.

More gender wage gap shenanigans from PolitiFact Oregon

Back in February, we pointed out PolitiFact Oregon's blunder in ruling it "Mostly True" that women in Oregon earn 79 cents on the dollar compared to men for doing the same job.

PolitiFact Oregon is back today with another misleading take on the gender wage gap.

The National Partnership For Women & Families, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, released a new analysis April 8, 2014, to coincide with Equal Pay Day. It cited U.S. Census data showing that women who work full time in Oregon are paid 79 cents for every dollar paid to men -- a claim PolitiFact Oregon has investigated previously and found solid.

But it went further. If the wage gap were eliminated, it said, "a working woman in Oregon would have enough money per year for 2,877 gallons of gas, 72 more weeks of food for her family or nearly 12 more months of rent.["]

PolitiFact Oregon apparently doesn't remember that its earlier fact check examined a version of the gender wage gap claim that had men and women doing the same work.

So we've got a fact check that focuses on a wage gap that exists primarily because men and women work at different jobs and men tend to put in longer hours.

This is a little like hearing "If you step on a crack, you'll break your mother's back" and then focusing intently on whether somebody stepped on a crack.

The National Partnership for Women & Families drew PolitiFact's attention with an April press release expressly designed to encourage support for paycheck fairness measures--measures that would do next to nothing to reduce the 21-cent gap that creates all the would-be disparities PolitiFact carefully verifies.

OMG!  We stepped on a crack!  Our poor mothers!

PolitiFact Oregon rules it "True" that we stepped on a crack the average woman in Oregon could afford to pay for more stuff if the wage gap was eliminated.  PolitiFact Oregon ignores the fact that the paycheck fairness measures the NPFWF supports would narrow the gender wage gap fractionally if at all.

Looks like PolitiFact Oregon is too busy fact checking to worry about little details like that.


Afters

We liked The Oregonian's added touch of promoting its gender wage gap story with teaser headlined with "That 79-cent gender pay gap and what it will buy."

A 79-cent gap!  What happened to the 21-cent gap?

The accompanying video has PolitiFact Oregon reporter Dana Tims expressing the NPFWF's argument, saying the pay gap would narrow if women were compensated fairly.  Tims also says the claim of a 21-cent pay gap in Oregon pretty much holds up when women and men are doing the same work, which is baloney.


Correction 4/12/2014:  Replaced the "e" in "women" in the next-to-last paragraph with an "a," changing it to the grammatically correct singular form.

Ho hum: PolitiFact flubs another gender wage gap disparity rating

It's been a blast for us here at PolitiFact Bias covering PolitiFact's inconsistency on the gender wage disparity.

June 22, 2012:  At my old blog "Sublime Bloviations" I tag PolitiFact National for going soft on President Obama.  PolitiFact gave the president a "Mostly False" rating for saying women receive 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.  It's a flat misuse of the statistic.

May 8, 2013:  We look at all of the PolitiFact gender wage gap stories available through that time, finding them inconsistent with each other, to say the least.

Jan 30, 2014:  We updated the gender wage gap series after President Obama implied the existence of a 23-cent gender wage gap in his State of the Union speech.  Incredibly, PolitiFact rated Obama's dissembling "Mostly True."

Now PolitiFact Oregon adds probably the most spectacular flub so far:

Image capture from PolitiFact.com, Feb. 20, 2014

PolitiFact Oregon simply neglects to factor into its fact checking whether Brad Avakian's statistics measure differences in pay for doing the same job.  It's a hugely embarrassing oversight, and it's highly likely PolitiFact Oregon will have to issue a correction.

Whether or not PolitiFact Oregon corrects the mistake, it's an astonishing error to find in material that claims to check facts.  And runs its findings past a team of editors before telling the world what's true and what's not.

We think it's pretty clear that PolitiFact's National's preposterously favorable rating of Obama's version of the claim in his 2014 State of the Union speech contributed to this error by PolitiFact Oregon:

For starters, the commissioner loses points for cherry-picking the 79-cent figure. Other means of measuring pay gaps between men and women put it considerably less.

The same can be said of the "for doing the same job" piece. As PolitiFact has found previously, the existence of a pay gap doesn’t necessarily mean that all of the gap is caused by individual employer-level discrimination, as Avakian’s claim implies. Some of the gap is at least partially explained by the predominance of women in lower-paying fields, rather than women necessarily being paid less for the same job than men are.

The PolitiFact Oregon story has but one of PolitiFact's past gender wage gap ratings listed among its sources:  PolitiFact National's rating of Obama's State of the Union speech.

PolitiFact makes its set of gender wage gap stories even less coherent

In a 2013 article, "PolitiFact and the 77-cent solution," we pointed out PolitiFact's inconsistency on gender gap claims.  There's a wage gap between men and women, primarily created by different job choices, and that gap is acceptably represented by the $.77 figure.  The Department of Justice estimates that about 40 percent of the $.23 shortfall, about $.09, occurs as a result of discrimination.

For claims about a gender wage gap in the range of $.77 on the dollar, PolitiFact's seven ratings at the time ranged  from "Half True" to "True."  In addition, Mitt Romney accurately claimed men make more than women in Obama's White House and received a "Half True" rating.

For claims where that gap was said to apply to the same work, PolitiFact gave two "Mostly False" ratings, including one to President Obama.

President Obama used the 77-cent figure during his State of the Union address.  And PolitiFact was on it, giving the president a "Mostly True" rating.

What did Obama say?  PolitiFact reports:

During his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama made a claim about pay for women in today’s economy.

"You know, today, women make up about half our workforce, but they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns," Obama said. "That is wrong, and in 2014, it's an embarrassment. Women deserve equal pay for equal work."

We think when Obama says the 23-cent gap is "wrong" and "an embarrassment" leading to a call for equal pay for equal work, it strongly implies the president is claiming the 23-cent gap occurs as a result of gender discrimination.

We don't see any other reasonable way to interpret the statement.

PolitiFact doesn't see it that way:

We struggled a bit with how to classify the claim Obama made in the State of the Union, since his phrasing was somewhat ambiguous. He used the more accurate formulation, but he then followed up two sentences later by saying, "Women deserve equal pay for equal work." Did Obama’s "equal pay for equal work" line suggest that he believes the 77-cent pay differential refers to statistical comparisons of "equal work"? Or was this sentence simply a philosophical statement that was distinct from the statistical claim?

Ultimately, we decided that Obama’s statement that "women deserve equal pay for equal work" was aspirational rather than a part of his statistical claim, so we’re judging him on his claim that women "make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns."

What purpose does the 77-cent figure serve in the president's speech other than to show the relevance of his call for equal pay for equal work?

Why would a 23-cent gap be wrong if it occurs on the basis of the free-market choices of employees and not gender discrimination?

It's obvious President Obama was making a sly version of the claim he made that PolitiFact rated "Mostly False":  He implied that the gap exists based on gender discrimination.

PolitiFact didn't want to see it.

PolitiFact and the 77-cent solution (Updated)

Is there gender discrimination in wages?

PolitiFact, a project of the Tampa Bay Times supposedly designed to help you find the truth in politics, has the answer.  In fact, PolitiFact does even better than giving us an answer.  It gives us two different answers to the same question.

Is it true that "women earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man"?

It's "Mostly True," says PolitiFact.  It's "Half True," says PolitiFact.

You'd think they might be able to settle on "Mostly Half True."

How is it that PolitiFact can reach two different conclusions about the same claim, know that it has reached two different conclusions regarding the same claim and yet fail to resolve the discrepancy?

This is supposed to be fact checking, not "Wheel of Fortune."

We've said for years that PolitiFact's rating system by its nature forces reporters and editors into making subjective judgment calls.  This case serves as yet another example supporting that claim.

Could some difference in the claims or the context of the claims justify a different rating?  PolitiFact mentions no such differences.  Yet PolitiFact has terrific motivation for explaining the different ratings.  In its recent fact check of Rep. Marcia Fudge's "77 cent" claim, PolitiFact Ohio cited other PolitiFact ratings of similar statements:

PolitiFact has made several examinations of the claim that women earn 76 to 77 percent as much as men, and found that they lacked context because they failed to account for factors like education, type of job, age of employee and experience level.

The hotlink associated with "several examinations" leads to a "Half True" rating from PolitiFact Georgia for a claim effectively identical to Fudge's.  Fudge received a "Mostly True" rating.

The writers and editors at PolitiFact apparently don't realize that linking to a closely parallel fact check with a different rating exposes a problem of inconsistency.

Inconsistency isn't bias!

By itself, inconsistency is not bias.  But patterns of inconsistency may provide evidence of bias.  We have that sort of pattern in PolitiFact's ratings of differences in pay by gender.

We can measure by tracking the frequency with which stories either favor one political party over another or cause harm to one party more often than to another.  My co-editor at PFB, Jeff D, points out that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a claim about differences in pay by gender during the 2012 election.  Romney noted that the equal pay candidate, President Obama, was paying male White House employees more than the female employees.  PolitiFact found that Romney was right.  And rated the claim "Half True":

In the broadest sense, the Romney campaign is on solid ground when it says that "women in Barack Obama's White House are earning less than men." But the closer you look at the data, the less striking this conclusion becomes.
 
...The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information, so we rate it Half True.

"The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information," so PolitiFact rates it "Half True."  There's just one problem.  That's the definition PolitiFact gives for "Mostly True":

MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information.

Even aside from that PolitiFact blunder that somehow escaped the notice of layers of editors, we see a pattern of partisan inconsistency.

Romney's statement, as Jeff points out, avoids false precision.  Romney simply says men get paid more than the women at the White House.  It's very hard to argue that Romney's statement is in any way more misleading than any of the "77 cent" claims.  Indeed, it's hard to argue that Romney misled any more than did the National Women's Law Center with its claim that every state has a gender wage gap.  PolitiFact Georgia rated that claim "True."  PolitiFact simply doesn't provide reasoning that would distinguish one rating from another in this similar set of claims.

Whether the correct rating is "Mostly True" or "Half True," the Republicans draw the short straw with PolitiFact in comparison to Democrats.



Afters

Here's the list of similar gender gap stories, followed by two stories where claimants used the 77 cent figure claiming it's the difference where men and women do the same work.

Diana DeGette says women earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man
"Mostly True"

R.I. Treasurer Gina Raimondo repeats oft-quoted, but misleading, statistic in equal pay debate
"Half True"

Rep. Marcia Fudge cites wage gap between Ohio women and men
"Mostly True"

Gender wage gap claim needs more context
"Half True"

Tim Kaine says Virginia women earn 79 cents to every $1 made by men
"Mostly True"

[National Women's Law Center] Is there a gender wage gap in every state?
"True"

Mitt Romney says women White House employees earn less than men under Barack Obama
"Half True"

Same job, same work

U.S. Rep. David Cicilline says women earn only 77 percent of what men earn in the same job
"Mostly False"

Barack Obama ad says women are paid "77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men"
"Mostly False"

Update July 10, 2013

A reader alerted us to another PolitiFact rating that fits with this group.  Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter lowers the bar for "Mostly False" by making the same job, same work claim while naming the wrong percentage.  Carter said the wage gap for the same job and same work averaged 70 cents on the dollar.  "Mostly False," said PolitiFact Georgia.

We wonder how low one could go with the percentage and still rate higher than "False"?