PRICING THOSE COOKIES. The feminist bake sale, with its 70 cent cookies for women and dollar cookies for men, somehow manages to get by the Sensitivity Police, despite creating a hostile climate for labor economists who have labored mightily to tease out any evidence of workplace discrimination. How misleading are those price differences? A graduate student summarizes:

So what kind of women's rights am I exactly campaigning for?....well, there is that whole wage discrimination thing....they say that women only make .70 for every dollar a man makes...but when all is said and done after considering the different industries men and women find themselves employed in, occupational categories, and the depreciation of human capital and thus lower wage, when the women leave the workforce to have children, differences in labor force experience, educational attainment,...etc., etc...the straight up discrimination factor can be boiled down to about $.06 or $.07 last time I checked...(according to whatever study I read like 5 years ago)

Alex at Marginal Revolution offers some new research that might be proposing a positive theory of that residual difference.