This article originally appeared in the Washington Examiner.

Women don’t pay a 20 percent tax in the workplace based on their sex.

The Gloria Cordes Larson Center for Women and Business at Bentley University in Massachusetts handed out free “Equal Pay for Equal Work” shirts to be worn Tuesday on April 2.

The day has been labeled Equal Pay Day or the day that supposedly represents how much longer women must work to earn what men did the previous year. This day isn’t just celebrated on campus. In Texas, the Women’s Fund is hosting an “Unhappy Hour” to mark the occasion, for example.

Additional equal pay legislation has been introduced in Congress in recognition of Equal Pay Day. I write “additional,” because we already have the 1963 Equal Pay Act (which made sex-based discrimination in pay illegal) and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which made workplace discrimination based on sex illegal). We all want equal pay for women.

Rather than being told that they are victims of systematic discrimination, young women should understand the statistic behind Equal Pay Day and the claim that women only make 77 cents (or now 81 cents) for every dollar a man makes.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics data measure median weekly earnings of women and men in full-time wage and salary jobs. In 2018, women earned 81.1 percent of the median weekly earnings of what men made in full-time wage and salary jobs. Thus, the Left claims that women pay a tax for being women. What’s missing is that the statistic does not compare two people in the same job, but instead just overall earnings of women and men. It also does not compare two people making the same labor choices, such as hours worked or education.

This Equal Pay Day, women should do something truly empowering: reject the Equal Pay Day narrative.