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Welcome to the Double X Gap Fest for Thursday, September 9th. This is Hannah Rosen. I am the co-editor of Double X, and I am here in the Washington, D.C. studio with the lovely Margaret Talbot from the New Yorker. Hi, Margaret. Hi, Margaret. Hi, and in our New York studio, we have Jessica Gross, who's the managing editor of double X. Hi, Jess.

Hi.

And today we have a kind of Battle of the Sexes Edition.

We are going to talk about, first, a study which shows that young women are out-earning young men by a considerable percentage.

Next, we're going to talk about whether the New York Times Book Review is a boys boys club and a controversy that's arisen over the last couple of weeks about that.

And third, about Saturday Night Live, the firing of Jenny Slate and whether comedy is a boys club.

So it's boys versus girls.

Let's start with the workplace study.

This was a really interesting study that was publicized in Time magazine.

It comes out of a study that was done by a group called REACH advisors. And what the study showed was that in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the full-time salaries of young women, this is women under 30, are 8% higher than the salaries of the boys in their peer group. And in some cities, it was considerably more. So this is really interesting, and we can qualify it in a hundred different ways. But do either

of you first, before I start qualifying the study and what's wrong with it, have any initial reactions

to it? It's interesting that, as you say, it's young women, and it's specifically young, unmarried

childless women. And they're compared to their boy counterparts.

And as you say, in a couple of the cities, the disparity is really great.

In Atlanta, I think it was 15% and in New York, or it's closer to 20%, something like that.

So it really is pretty significant, I would say.

The question is, I think,

is this group of women as they do marry and have children, will they maintain that economic

edge or will they give it up because they'll pay some sort of mommy tax or mommy track tax as they go on?

Right. That's the first big question is what happens to the women later in life because this is a specific set of women, which is young childless women, which I want to talk about. But I also want to talk about the fundamental question with this study. Is it, are we comparing apples and apples or apples and oranges? Is it the same women making more money than the same men, right? Because when you read this study, you think, oh my God, the wage gap is over. But in fact, it's not true. You don't know which women are making more money than which men. And given the cities they talk about, it's sort of in the poorer cities where the women are making a lot more money than the men. So that's places where you have different disparities.

It doesn't mean like a woman with the same degree and the same education, the same job, is making more money than a man with the same education, the same degree. It's like women overall versus men overall. I mean, I don't have any interest in kind of disqualifying the study because I think it's really, really interesting. And since I'm queen of the end of men,

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