Is there really a wage gap?  Of course. And not exactly.

How many times have you heard that “women are paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men”? Barack Obama said it during his last campaign. Women’s groups say it every April 9, which is Equal Pay Day. In preparation for Labor Day, a group protesting outside Macy’s this week repeated it, too, holding up signs and sending out press releases saying “women make $.77 to every dollar men make on the job.” I’ve heard the line enough times that I feel the need to set the record straight: It’s not true.

Like most statistics thrown about to rile up the troops, who are looking for proof that what they feel is what is real, the platitudinous wage gap is a simplistic fiction. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a real wage gap, where a man and a woman are hired to perform the same job for the same number of hours per week, but are paid a different wage to do so.

Is this wrong? From a fairness perspective, obviously. From an employer’s perspective, not at all. After all, someone doesn’t run a business for the purpose of paying wages higher than necessary. Every dollar they pay out in employee wages is one less they earn in profit. It’s not hard to understand.  Employers are leveraging the ability to get women to work for less than men to enhance their bottom line.

For those who believe in capitalism and the value of the free market, this is how it should be. For those who believe, as a matter of policy, that this is wrong despite it being completely understandable, this should change. But how?

Massachusetts passed a law that prohibits, inter alia, employers from inquiring during initial hiring interviews the prior salaries earned.

The new law will require hiring managers to state a compensation figure upfront — based on what an applicant’s worth is to the company, rather than on what he or she made in a previous position.

The bipartisan legislation, signed into law on Monday by Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, is being pushed as a model for other states, as the issue of men historically outearning women who do the same job has leapt onto the national political scene.

There is already a federal law prohibiting wage discrimination, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, but it hasn’t accomplished much of anything. Much of its failure is attributed to this caveat, that the jobs in question:

requires equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and which are performed under similar working conditions, except where such payment is made pursuant to (i) a seniority system; (ii) a merit system; (iii) a system which measures earnings by quantity or quality of production; or (iv) a differential based on any other factor other than sex…

There are enough gaps in there to drive a Mack truck though, and the truck would be driven by a guy because women don’t drive trucks, right? The Massachusetts law approaches the problem from an entirely different perspective:

By barring companies from asking prospective employees how much they earned at their last jobs, Massachusetts will ensure that the historically lower wages and salaries assigned to women and minorities do not follow them for their entire careers. Companies tend to set salaries for new hires using their previous pay as a base line.

It’s certainly true that many companies use former salary as a baseline for the salary to be offered, so someone who was underpaid before will continue to be underpaid going forward as a result. There is another common variation on the theme, for employers to ask a job applicant for their salary requirements. If the applicant wants the job, they’ll aim low to get it. That becomes their baseline salary for the position for the balance of their tenure.

What the Massachusetts law does is shift the balance of power from the company to the potential new hire.  Instead of the employee having to guess how much they can ask in salary before the company decides they’re too expensive (or greedy), it puts the onus on the company to guess how much the employee will take before deciding to take another, better paying job.

If the company wants the employee badly enough, it will make a better offer. If the company is swimming in qualified applicants, it need only offer what the market will bear. If one applicant turns it down, there are plenty of others to choose form.

At the New York Times Room for Debate, four views on the question of how to “reduce the pay gap” were offered.  The word “debate” doesn’t always mean what they think it does over there. One of the “debaters,” lawprof Nicole Porter, recognizes that while the Massachusetts law may help with part of the problem, it’s falls short of a fix.

Because it forbids employers only from seeking prior salary information, it does not preclude applicants from voluntarily disclosing that information and then using it to negotiate a higher salary. A voluminous amount of literature makes clear that (as a general rule, subject to many exceptions) women do not negotiate on their own behalf as often as men. The reasons for this are numerous and complex, but simply stated, women have been socialized to believe asking on their own behalf is a gender norm violation.

To respond that women need to get over it, join a “lean in” group, isn’t sufficient to address this gender norm violation.

Women’s experience often bears out this belief, as many experience resentment or even withdrawn offers when they do try to negotiate for a better compensation package.

While this may be a by-product of sexism, it may also be a by-product of a labor market where there are too few jobs, giving employers the latitude to say, “nah.”

As long as employers are allowed to pay unequal wages to men and women doing comparable work simply because the men negotiated for more (perhaps after voluntarily disclosing a higher prior salary) we will not completely eradicate the pay gap.

Notice that unequal wages just shifted to “comparable work”? When it comes to equal pay for equal work, men find disparities just like women. Not all men are paid the same for the same job. Not all women are paid less. There is a wide range of reasons why wage disparities exist, and a clear motivation on the part of employers to pay the least amount possible to obtain qualified employees.

As soon as we fuzzy up the line with words like “comparable,” and forbid employers from making distinctions on legitimate bases, such as education,* experience or skill level, there will be fairly obvious unintended consequences, not the least of which is that employers will have a disincentive from hiring women at all if they can get men to do the job at the same (or lower) wage without fear of being targeted for litigation.

As much as social engineering seems to be viable and necessary from the perspective of fixing culture norms that no longer comport with our preferred policy, money knows no gender. It would be a wonderful world if employers would put profit after wage equity, but the efforts to force it by means of law may not only fail, but backfire.

*Consider a law requiring an employer to equate a degree in gender studies with a degree in a discipline that relates directly to the job in order to eliminate wage disparities based on education. If you think about it, it’s not nearly as crazy as it first appears.