GOP presidents close the gender wage gap?!

From the WSJ, a semi-serious or really funny article by Casey Mulligan on wage equality between men and women...

Using the facile, selective and easy-causality "logic" of some on the Left, Republicans should get credit for closing the wage gap between women and men. (As an example, see: racism vs. Obama and sexism vs. Palin or the claim that wage gaps necessarily infer discrimination.)

Democratic candidates Barack Obama and Joseph Biden have proclaimed that they favor equal pay for women, and have alleged that Republicans do not. Sen. Biden has also insisted that Republicans, including vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, represent a step backwards for women.

More rich logic in that last sentence...

The economic record says exactly the opposite.

I have used labor market data from the Census Bureau to study the amount and reasons for women's progress in the labor market since the 1960s. One byproduct of my study is a calculation of women's relative wage growth by presidential administration.

In 1980 -- the last full year of the Jimmy Carter administration -- the typical woman (older than school age, but younger than retirement age) working full time throughout the year earned 38.5% less per hour than did the typical man in the same age bracket working full time throughout the year. When women earn less per hour than men -- even in full-time work -- that is known as the gender wage gap. When the gender wage gap narrows, women's wages have grown relative to men's.

The gender wage gap was 38.6% in 1976, the last full year of the Gerald Ford administration. By this measure, women made only infinitesimal progress toward equal wages during the four Carter years; women's wages were essentially stagnant relative to men's. In 1988, the last full year of the Ronald Reagan administration, women working full time throughout the year earned 30.3% less per hour than did men.

A 30.3% gender wage gap is obviously not full equality. But it is much closer to equality than it was at the end of the Carter administration. Women's wages grew almost two percentage points per year more than men's during the Reagan years, compared to less than 0.1 percentage point more than men's per year during the Carter years....

Of course, the presidents have nothing to do with it-- although I'm sure Democrats would take all sorts of credit if the numbers were reversed. The gap has closed because women are pursuing education and career differently than yesterday's high proportion of June Cleavers.