GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters falsely says the gender pay gap is a ‘fake left-wing narrative’ because men do ‘the most dangerous jobs’

• An Arizona Republican Senate candidate said the gender pay gap is “a left-wing narrative.”
• Blake Masters, an acolyte of businessman Peter Theil, made the comments in a video obtained by NBC.
• Masters has received more than $10 million in support from Thiel via a super PAC.

Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters questioned the existence of a gender-based pay gap in America in a newly obtained video from NBC News, even though data shows men typically earn more than women for comparable jobs.

“Women are not paid less in America than men,” Masters said. “It’s a left-wing narrative, this gender pay gap. When you control for the occupations, when you control for people taking time out to, you know, birth children, things are actually pretty equal. And men do the most dangerous jobs.”

—Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) May 11, 2022

Masters’ campaign declined to provide comment when Insider reached out.

NBC News first reported on Masters’ statements on Wednesday. According to NBC, Masters made the comments during an appearance at a February 4 candidate forum in Scottsdale, Arizona. Masters is a close ally of Peter Thiel, a billionaire tech entrepreneur. Through a super PAC, Thiel has already spent $10 million to help Masters win.

Masters said that the gap does not exist when it is taken into account that men do “most dangerous jobs.” He made the remarks during a discussion of the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA once received bipartisan support, but it has become heavily politicized in recent years as more Republicans oppose passing a Constitutional amendment that would prohibit discrimination on the ba

“Men are the ones who are doing risky, you know, fishing–crab in Alaska,” Masters said. And sometimes those jobs pay more. Sometimes those jobs pay more, and so I think we got to push back on the fake left-wing narrative that women don’t have equal rights in this country.”

The reality is different from Masters’ assertion as the gender-based pay gap has been extensively researched and documented. Pew Research found last year that the gap between men and women has “remained fairly stable for the last 15 years or so.” In 2020, Pew found that women earned 84% of what men earned.

Regarding Master’s assertions, researchers concede that various factors and outliers can affect the size of the gap. But research that tries to take this into account still finds a gap exists. Glass Door’s latest survey of the situation found “workers with the same job title, employer and location, the US gender pay gap is about 5.4 percent.” In other words, according to their findings, women make 94.6 cents on the dollar compared to men.

The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, previously said there’s some merit to suggestions that the gap narrows based on career differences. But researchers there have also argued that career choice isn’t as straightforward as it seems.

“Gender discrimination doesn’t happen only in the pay-setting practices of employers making wage offers to nearly identical workers of different genders,” Elise Gould, Jessica Schieder, and Kathleen Geier wrote in 2016. “It can happen at every stage of a woman’s life, from steering her away from science and technology education to shouldering her with home responsibilities that impede her capacity to work the long hours of demanding professions.”

Masters is polling in the top three of Arizona’s Republican Senate primary, just six percentage points behind Jim Lamon in first place, according to Trafalgar and the Real Clear Politics polling average.

Masters’ has received more than $10 million from billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel, mostly in the form of donations to a pro-Masters super PAC called Saving Arizona.

Masters had been working as the chief operating officer of Thiel Capital and the president of the Thiel Foundation before officially launching his campaign.