The gender wage discrimination issue makes my head start to hurt every time it is raised, which, I admit, has made me grateful that Hillary and Bernie have been concentrating on the other progressive issues they fill with half-truths and deceit. Some of those are the wealth gap, mass incarceration, the evil of big banks, discrimination against Muslims, trigger-happy police, campus sexual assault, climate change, gun violence  and the minimum wage. As with these pet progressive agenda items, it isn’t that there aren’t real problems there that require effective policy initiatives, but that advocates are so infuriatingly dishonest when debating them—exaggerating statistics, demonizing opponents, and persisting in using false facts, studies and myths long after they have been definitively disproved.

If the new media was competent and even-handed, challenging the false assertions as they should, this would not be such an impediment to rational debate. The news media is seldom objective, however. On all of these issues and more, it plays the role of advocate and partisan ally with depressing regularity. An activist on the keft has to make a truly outrageous statement to even be challenged, as when Black Lives Matter organizer Aaron Goggans suggested on CNN yesterday that black on black crime is a “myth.”

There is gender discrimination in wages; I have seen it up close, in my family and in companies and organizations I have worked for. I have personally taken action to address it. The issue is complicated, however, and not close to the absurd “77 cents on the dollar” figure that has been employed, unchanged and virtually unchallenged, for decades, nor is it fairly represented by studies that show how men in the same careers make more over their working lives than women.

Never mind; the news media allows the issue to be debated in an atmosphere dominated by misrepresentations. My reflex approach is that  until advocates for a position are willing to stop lying, spinning, and demonizing, I will pointedly avoid supporting them. Call it the Clean Hands Doctrine. Gun control is one example. Climate change is another.

When  five players on the U.S. Women’s Soccer team filed a federal complaint last week accusing U.S. Soccer of wage discrimination because, they said, they earned as little as 40% of what players on the United States men’s national team earned despite reaching the team’s third World Cup championship last year, I read and heard nothing but cheers from women’s advocates, Democrats, pundits and Facebook posters I also read nothing but sexist snorting from the conservative side. (“Wanna know how to get paid the same as men for playing soccer? Try out for the men’s team! HAR!” ). The truth, as usual, is somewhere in the middle, but you wouldn’t know that from reading most accounts or watching the news channels.

If one looks a bit deeper than the simple fact of the compensation numbers, it is apparent that this is a pretty typical example of what passes for gender discrimination in wages: an apples and oranges comparison that ignores informed and volitional choices made by women that led to a significant wage disparity.

It is true that the men’s soccer team has historically been mediocre, while the women’s team has regularly won world and Olympic championships, garnering brief but intense national attention. “The numbers speak for themselves,”  goalkeeper Hope Solo, one of the players to sign the complaint, told reporters. “We are the best in the world, have three World Cup championships, four Olympic championships.” Solo said the men’s players “get paid more to just show up than we get paid to win major championships.”

U.S. Soccer officials cite figures showing that the men’s national team produces revenue and attendance nearly twice that of the women’s team, and men’s soccer television ratings are far higher than those of the women. I don’t know whether those assertions stand up to scrutiny, but they make sense: the men are better soccer players than the women, and play tougher competition. Very few news reports on the law suit bothered to mention this rather obvious apples and oranges feature. As with golf, tennis, basketball…boxing!…the men’s version of the game and the women’s version are virtually different sports. That they both have “soccer” in their name automatically doesn’t make them “equal work.”

Michael LeRoy, who teaches collective bargaining and sports at the University of Illinois, told the New York Times that market conditions between the men’s and women’s sports are vastly different. “They have to prove equality of work and market conditions, and it’s such a rigid legal requirement,” LeRoy said of the women’s soccer players.

In a thorough and otherwise excellent New York Times report on the lawsuit, this information appeared a full 1,261 words into the article—1,261 words!—as if it was a footnote, when in fact it is material and typical of many instances of alleged wage bias:

“In response to the complaint filed Wednesday, U.S. Soccer argued that not only was the players’ pay collectively bargained, but that the players had insisted more than once on a salary-based system as a means of economic security over the bonus-centric plan the men work under. Russell Sauer, the outside counsel for the federation during labor talks, also said the women’s labor contract included provisions — severance and injury pay, health benefits and maternity leave, for example — not available to the men’s team.

“The truth is,” Sauer said, “the players are claiming discrimination based on a more conservative structure, based on guaranteed compensation rather than pay to play, which they themselves requested, negotiated and approved of not once, but twice.”

In other words, the women were not willing to take the risk the men do of basing more of their compensation on their success, and settled for a guaranteed amount—then, when they were successful, complained that the amount wasn’t enough. They also bargained for special features that the men did not view as important, and sacrificed more money in the negotiation process. If true, then the lawsuit is unethical: relying on stirring up public and political support while actually protesting the results of their own conservative bargaining strategy and blaming U.S. Soccer because the deal they negotiated turned out to be a poor one.

Now, maybe U.S. Soccer is spinning too. All of the parties have a record of being less than trustworthy—Hope Solo, for example. Nevertheless, this law suit should not be automatically regarded as a vindication for anti-wage discrimination activists or an act of courage and principle by the women. It may well be an example of what’s wrong with the whole wage discrimination narrative, and an exercise in blame-shifting and greed. We shall see.

Until we see, the news media is obligated to explain that the women are not automatically in the right just because they are crying bias and because they are women.

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Pointer: Advice Goddess Blog