Beyoncé: Gender Equality 'Isn't a Reality Yet'

Powerful, multi-millionaire pop singer Beyoncé has a message for America: women are oppressed.

The singer called the idea that we are anywhere near “gender equality” a “myth” that we all need to “stop buying into.”

Beyoncé made the comments in a January 12 post at the Shriver Report.

“Today, women make up half of the U.S. workforce, but the average working woman earns only 77 percent of what the average working man makes,” Beyoncé wrote.

Beyoncé’s post is an except from an upcoming book titled The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink, a project sponsored by the left-wing think tank Center for American Progress.

The singer insisted that the disparities she claims exists won’t go away until “men and women are granted equal pay and equal respect.” She wrote:

Humanity requires both men and women, and we are equally important and need one another. So why are we viewed as less than equal? These old attitudes are drilled into us from the very beginning. We have to teach our boys the rules of equality and respect, so that as they grow up, gender equality becomes a natural way of life. And we have to teach our girls that they can reach as high as humanly possible.

“We have a lot of work to do,” Beyoncé concludes, “but we can get there if we work together. Women are more than 50 percent of the population and more than 50 percent of voters. We must demand that we all receive 100 percent of the opportunities.”

Are all these claims true? They don’t seem to be. Even FactCheck.org says that this 77-cents-on-the-dollar claim is not true. 

In a June 2012 report, the fact checkers said that Obama’s claims that a woman only makes 77 cents to a man’s dollar were an “exaggeration.”

Factcheck noted that the 77-cents claim is a distortion because it is not a job-for-job comparison. “Furthermore,” the checkers said, “the raw gap for all women is not quite as large when looking at weekly earnings rather than yearly earnings.”

The checkers concluded that when Obama used that claim in his 2012 campaign he was “flatly” wrong:

But the president was flatly wrong to say that women are paid 77 percent of the pay of men for the “same work.” And the fact that women’s median annual earnings are 77 percent of men’s isn’t all or even mostly due to discrimination, as the ad implies.

This is the same misleading statistic that Beyoncé used. So, one can say that FactCheck.org also called her claims “flatly wrong.”