B and B

Cache River National Wildlife Refuge

Via NASA's Earth Observing System, here is a recent satellite image of the Cache River National Wildlife Regure, where the ivory-billed woodpecker was found in the last year.  This has suddenly become a very special place.

The small white bar at bottom left represents a scale of 2 km.  The caption reads, in part:

In this image from NASA’s Landsat 7 satellite, acquired on December 23, 2001, the dense vegetation of swampy bottomland forests, sloughs, oxbow river bends, and bayous in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge makes a dramatic contrast to the geometric checkerboard of farmlands. Ground that is bare or sparsely vegetated appears pinkish tan. The dense (but leafless in winter) vegetation of the refuge’s tupelo and cypress forests appears dark gray. When you look carefully (particularly in the high-resolution image), the forests are interwoven with swampy areas that appear lighter gray. A large swath of this gray swampy area runs through the narrow strip of the refuge that follows the Deview Bayou northeast of the large protected area near image center. Interstate 40 cuts diagonally across the southern part of this large tract of land.

Images like this emphasize how amazing the re-discovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker is.  Given the huge areas it needs to survive, how could it have possibly survived for over six decades in places like this?  Hopefully we will learn answers to this and other questions in the coming years, and that the answers will help us to ensure that the ivory-bills, and other species, continue to survive.

UPDATE (5/2): Updated link under 'satellite image' above.

Ivory-billed woodpecker: the next day

The day after the amazing announcement that the ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct after all, some skeptics have emerged.

Nick Matzke, at The Panda's Thumb, despite an admitted lack of expertise, worries that the bird seen may not actually be an ivory-bill. 

... I’ve got a bad feeling that hopes are going to be dashed again.  What they’ve put up in terms of data is scans of field notes and a detailed analysis of one very short video that is being interpreted right at the limits of its resolution.

As I mentioned yesterday, my initial reaction also was disbelief, but when I read how confident the experts are about this, how they spent over a year working on confirmation, I became convinced.  Then I read the paper, watched the video, and remained convinced.  Matzke's concern about the video is unfounded, in my opinion.  Perhaps my confidence in the analysis of the video is a remnant of my background in astronomy.  I am very used to the process of teasing significant amounts of information out of noisy, low-resolution data.  By comparison with much of what astronomers frequently work with, the woodpecker video is extremely detailed.  And, of course, the video is just the icing on the cake of the numerous sightings by expert ornithologists.

Meanwhile, Carl Zimmer, seconded by Chris Mooney, cautions that just because some ivory-bills may still live, much ecological devastation has already occurred, both in the U.S. and around the world, and numerous other species may be doomed. Of course this isn't exactly news and so should do nothing to allay the joy that at least one species thought extinct may still have a chance at survival.  If a few ivory-bills could survive on their own for decades with no special protections for its habitat, the species should have a decent chance for longer-term survival now that such special protections will be put in place.

Finally, PZ Myers at Pharyngula lets his cynical side come to the forefront:

Call me a cynic, but my first thought was that one bird does not a species make, and that I don't find cause to celebrate in the fact that we made it to the wreckage in time to catch the last gasps of a magnificent animal. "We killed them all…but one!" is not an inspiring rallying cry for environmentalists.

Fortunately, Myers' imagined rallying cry is almost certainly not true.  Hedwig at Living the Scientific Life publishes an email distributed by Scott Weidensaul, a nature writer who was a participant in the search party in Arkansas.  He writes (emphasis added):

The sightings were all of a single bird, always a male (though there was one undocumented sighting of a possible female). It appears the search team was not operating near the bird's normal home range, since the sightings averaged only about one per month; this is a huge area, and there's lots of room for even a duck-sized woodpecker to disappear. No one thinks it likely that this bird is the very last of its kind, so it's likely there are more out there in the huge Big Woods region, or in other bottomland forests along the Mississippi Delta.

Interestingly, in contrast to the noisy, fairly tame behavior Jim Tanner recorded for the species in Louisiana in the 1930s, this bird has proven incredibly shy and wary, always vanishing at the first hint of a human. Many people -- and I include myself in this -- had long assumed that if ivorybills survived in the U.S., someone would have found and documented them decades ago. The fact that so many people, backed up with technology like automated recording devices and cameras, had such a hard time getting documentation in the Big Woods, suggests we've been underestimating the difficulty of finding this species. The "intensive" Pearl River search [in 2002], for example, involved six people for 30 days; most times that a sighting has been followed up, it's been someone in a canoe poking around for a day or two at most. One lesson from the Big Woods is that we cannot easily dismiss any of the reports elsewhere in the species' historic range, especially those in South Carolina and Florida which have been persistent for many years. I know scientists are following up on some of those reports even as the news is trumpeted from Arkansas. Let's all keep our fingers crossed.

This is one of the most hopeful stories I've ever had the privilege to report on, and it comes at a time when conservationists need some good news. It shows how incredibly resilient nature can be if we give it a chance.

Indeed, we need some good news, and this definitely counts.  What happens next is up to all of us, but at least there is hope.

Update on GOP attempt to drill Arctic Wildlife Refuge

Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, reports on the status of the GOP legislative attempt to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  Apparently there is at least some hope that the budget that contains this can be defeated in the House later today.  Even if not, there is hope to defeat it later in the year.

The House leadership is desperately scrambling to find enough votes to pass a budget that would allow drilling the Arctic. Right now, they don't have the votes -- they are meeting in Caucus and sharing the proposal they have put together, so there are some details we still await. ... Over on the Senate side, swing Senators like Susan Collins are hoping that the final deal will not include Arctic drilling, but I think they are likely to be disappointed -- although if the House, which votes first, kills the budget, as it looks at this moment like it might do tonight, the Senators will be off the hook. Even if we lose today, the final and decisive round will still come in September on Budget Reconciliation but, if we win today, the Arctic is safe for another year, and probably until the next elections.

UPDATE: Well, that hope was dashed. The budget with drilling in it passed by 3 votes according to Pope's update.

Ivory-billed woodpecker lives on

Wow.

Morning Edition, April 28, 2005 · A group of wildlife scientists believe the ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct. They say they have made seven firm sightings of the bird in central Arkansas. The landmark find caps a search that began more than 60 years ago, after biologists said North America’s largest woodpecker had become extinct in the United States.

The large, showy bird is an American legend -- it disappeared when the big bottomland forests of North America were logged, and relentless searches have produced only false alarms. Now, in an intensive year-long search in the Cache River and White River national wildlife refuges involving more than 50 experts and field biologists working together as part of the Big Woods Partnership, an ivory-billed male has been captured on video.

"We have solid evidence, there are solid sightings, this bird is here," says Tim Barksdale, a wildlife photographer and biologist.

For an NPR/National Geographic Radio Expeditions story, NPR science correspondent Christopher Joyce joined the search last January along Arkansas’ White River, where a kayaker spotted what he believed to be an ivory-billed woodpecker more than a year ago. Many other similar sightings over the last 60 years have raised false hopes.

But this time, Joyce reports that experts associated with the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in New York and The Nature Conservancy were able to confirm the sighting. They kept the find a secret for more than a year, partly to give conservation groups and government agencies time to protect the bird’s habitat.

The Nature Conservancy has been buying and protecting land along the White and Cache Rivers for years, along with the state and the federal Fish and Wildlife Service. Since the discovery, they've bought more land to protect the bird.

That's a pretty big secret to keep for a year, especially when reporters are in on it.  Very impressive.

When I first was told that an ivory-billed woodpecker was found, I was skeptical.  I've heard some of the false alarms over the years.  But this time it's different.  This time it's actually been seen multiple times by numerous experts, even captured on video.  They sound extremely confident.  So who am I to be skeptical?  I'm sold.

"The bird captured on video is clearly an ivory-billed woodpecker. Amazingly, America may have another chance to protect the future of this spectacular bird and the awesome forests in which it lives," Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, said in a statement.

The most recent false alarm that I heard of was based on a plausible sighting in Louisiana in 1999.  As a result of that, two methodical searches were performed in early 2002.  One by a "dream team" funded by Zeiss Sports Optics, and one from Cornell that set up state-of-the-art recording devices to listen for the bird's call.

The Zeiss team failed to see a bird, but they found tantalizing evidence: large nest cavities, tree bark possibly peeled by hungry ivory-bills looking for beetle larvae -- and an unusual drumming sound. The series of loud raps were unlike any other woodpecker the team had ever heard.

Unfortunately, the recording devices set up by Cornell did not detect any evidence of ivory-bills over the following months.  So the 2002 effort, despite all the attention it received, ended in disappointment.

This year, the story is different.  Amazingly so.   

Hedwig at Living the Scientific Life writes:

I am joyful beyond words. The world is a better, richer, more magical place. Knowing that this magnificent bird lives still, despite all the terrible things that we have done to them, provides a glimmer of hope that not all is lost.

And Mike at 10,000 Birds:

Details on this momentous event are forthcoming and will be the subject of an announcement by the journal Science later today. But for now, we can savor the satisfaction of this joyous discovery, a validation of two undeniable truths. The first, of course, is that where there is life, there's hope. The second, no less profound, is that we have no earthly idea what goes on in the backwoods of Arkansas!

Reading the stories about the 2002 search again, I was struck by this quote from the aforementioned John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology:

"It's so hard for me to talk about the idea of seeing an ivory-billed woodpecker without actually getting a little choked up," he tells NPR correspondent Christopher Joyce. "It would be so huge, it's a bird that everybody who becomes a birdwatcher, who looked at the pictures in the Peterson Field Guide since they could read, and have dreamed about this spectacular bird and all these beautiful forests it was in. The idea of actually laying eyes on one, I would burst out into tears."

I have not devoted my life to studying birds as Fitzpatrick has, but even the thought that they are still alive after 60 years and so much previously-futile searching makes me feel similarly.

UPDATE:  From the press release announcing this amazing news, it appears Fitzpatick, unsurprisingly, is not alone in his feelings:

While kayaking in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge on Feb. 11, 2004, Gene Sparling of Hot Springs, Ark., saw an unusually large, red-crested woodpecker fly toward him and land on a nearby tree. He noticed several field marks suggesting the bird was an ivory-billed woodpecker.

A week later, after learning of the sighting, Tim Gallagher, editor of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Living Bird magazine, and Bobby Harrison, associate professor at Oakwood College, Huntsville, Ala., interviewed Sparling. They were so convinced by his report that they traveled to Arkansas and then with Sparling to the bayou where he had seen the bird.

On Feb. 27, as Sparling paddled ahead, a large black-and-white woodpecker flew across the bayou less than 70 feet in front of Gallagher and Harrison, who simultaneously cried out: "Ivory-bill!" Minutes later, after the bird had disappeared into the forest, Gallagher and Harrison sat down to sketch independently what each had seen. Their field sketches, included in the Science article, show the characteristic patterns of white and black on the wings of the woodpecker.

"When we finished our notes," Gallagher said, "Bobby sat down on a log, put his face in his hands and began to sob, saying, 'I saw an ivory-bill. I saw an ivory-bill.'" Gallagher said he was too choked with emotion to speak. "Just to think this bird made it into the 21st century gives me chills. It's like a funeral shroud has been pulled back, giving us a glimpse of a living bird, rising Lazarus-like from the grave," he said.

UPDATE 2:  Via Democratic Underground, here is an eyewitness account of an ivory-bill sighting in Arkansas in 2003 by amateur enthusiast Mary Scott, who runs a website entitled Birding America.  She closes with this:

The strangest thing about seeing a living Ivory-billed Woodpecker was that it was just a bird, albeit a magnificent one, going about its life in the swamp. We humans tend to project our angst about the damage we have done to our natural world on icons of loss, like the ivorybill. Happily, the bird I saw was doing fine. He was cruising around a beautiful world, on a beautiful day, and although he may have been wondering if there was a female around, or how his little family was doing, he wasn't burdened with gloomy thoughts of extinction. That is our burden to bear.

UPDATE 3:  The Science article is now online.

Texas legislature to act soon on the 'Taxpayer Extortion Act'

The Texas legislature is acting soon on the alleged "property rights" bill that in actuality forces taxpayers to pay real estate developers to behave responsibly and not pollute our water.  This is the "takings" bill being pushed by GOP Agriculture Commissioner Susan Combs and the deceptive group of real estate developers and land speculators that calls themselves the Texas Landowners Conservancy and that hides their personal monetary interests behind a false front of concern for the environment.

In fact, it appears the House may be acting today on their version, HB 2833.  Please call your state representative as soon as possible.  Information on state representatives is available at this link.

The state Senate looks to be holding a public hearing today on their version, SB 1647.  Please call your state senator as well.  Again, see this link for information on state senators.

The Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance summarizes HB 2833 like this:

This bill would require the Cities to PAY landowners when they develop their property at less than 45% impervious cover (impervious cover is rooftops, building, roads). San Antonio, Austin, San Marcos and other cities limit impervious cover to 15% to 20% in the most sensitive areas of the watershed. This bill would make taxpayers pay the difference in profits when the city ordinances apply. The legislators behind this bill have said that taxpayers should pay developers when water quality protections cut into developer profits, and we don't have a right to clean water.

The only thing these bills do is preserve the ability of real estate developers and land speculators to make a fortune at the expense of the taxpayers' ability to protect their water quality.  Please read my three previous posts on this issue for more on the story behind this piece of legislative extortion:  Paying polluters not to pollute, What is the Texas Landowners Conservancy, and Extortion and the Ag Commissioner.

The gender wage gap in stark detail

A couple days ago, I pointed out how one very common excuse heard from wage gap deniers is false:  the idea that women earn less than men because women take large amounts of time off from their careers.  The final nail in the coffin for that myth is a GAO report from 2003 that performs a detailed analysis of salary data for men and women, controlling for numerous independent variables such as annual hours worked, time out of the labor force, work experience, highest education achieved, industry, and more.  Controlling for all those variables, the study still found a pay gap of over 20% between men and women in the year 2000.

It didn't take long for me to find the myth still being propagated.  The very next day, a conservative contributor to the blog Polar Opposite Politics quoted another blog saying:

When I am confronted with evidence that women earn less than men I do not take this as a sign of discrimination. Instead, I point out that if you add to the regression a variable measuring continuous attachment to the work-force the difference in wages fades away.

I pointed out the data directly contradicting this statement, and that got us started in a conversation about this issue (at both his blog and mine), as he continued to insist that the wage gap could be "easily explained away" by women's choices.

One weakness of the GAO study is that it only controlled for occupation via broad categories such as "professional, technical" and "nonfarm laborers."  But this does not mean the wage gap can be explained away be different occupational choices by men and women within these broad categories.  Further studies demonstrate that the wage gap persists even in much more specific occupational categories.  In fact, a significant pay differential exists in virtually every single such category. 

The Census Bureau released a study in May 2004 entitled "Evidence From Census 2000 About Earnings by Detailed Occupation for Men and Women."  On page 12, it states:

Fifteen of the 20 listed [highest-paid] occupations for men appear on the list [of the 20 highest-paid occupations] for women, and in all cases, the female median is less than that for men.  In fact, the occupation third on the list for women makes the same as the occupation last on the list for men ($67,000). A similar pattern is shown for the lowest-paid occupations (Table 6).  Sixteen occupations appear on both lists, and in all cases but one ... women make less than men in the same occupation.

In only 11 out of 422 detailed occupations with 10,000 or more year-round full-time workers did the Census Bureau find that female median earnings were statistically indistinguishable from male median earnings.

Among the highest-paid occupations:  women physicians and surgeons earn 63% of what men do; women dentists, 62%; women judges, magistrates, and other judicial workers, 57%; women actuaries, 70%; women economists, 82%; women chemical engineers, 80%; women chief executives, 63%.

Among the lowest-paid occupations:  women dishwashers earn 86% of what men do; women farmers and ranchers, 60%; women cooks, 88%; women maids and housekeeping cleaners, 79%; women teacher assistants, 75%.

Take this Census data, across 411 out of 422 detailed occupations, combine it with the GAO study that controls for numerous independent variables, and the existence of a wage gap that is not "easily explained away" is readily apparent.

Unfortunately, discrimination, both the overt kind and the more subtle, social-pressure, kind, cannot be measured via studies like these.  No one admits to purposefully paying women less for equivalent work.  (After all, it is technically against the law these days.) So those who seek to deny the significance of discrimination continue waving their hands and inventing more and more excuses for the huge amounts of data that demonstrate the large pay differential between men and women.

Perhaps, as the Census Bureau hypothesizes for the pay gap for physicians and surgeons, "different degrees of specialization within an occupation and different choices of industry or business organization may affect the ratio.  For example, women might choose more frequently than men to practice in lower-paid medical specialties (such as pediatrics) or in lower-paid institutional settings (such as health maintenance organizations)."

Even if this were so, which is not at all clear, and even if this were purely due to women's personal preferences, which again is not at all clear, this argument cannot be plausibly extended across 411 out of 422 occupations.   Alas, experience shows that this does not stop the wage gap deniers from trying.

The GAO, in concluding their study, offers up some further speculative straws for the wage gap deniers to grasp:

Some experts believe that women and men generally have different life priorities—women choose to place higher priority on home and family, while men choose to place higher priority on career and earnings.  These women may voluntarily give up potential for higher earnings to focus on home and family.

This non-expert, but very interested observer, finds that argument extremely unconvincing.  In this country, women have a long history of being underpaid relative to men for the same work.  Has it all suddenly ended in the last 20 years?  Both anecdotal evidence and the hard data strongly suggest not.

Santorum versus the National Weather Service

Believe it or not, a member of the GOP leadership in the Senate, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, wants to prevent the National Weather Service from offering their weather reports to the public for free.  Apparently commercial outfits like AccuWeather don't feel they can compete.

I saw this news yesterday and thought about posting about it, but am now glad I didn't, since Josh Marshall has put together the consummate summary:

Plenty of federal legislation these days boils down to this sort of rip-off of the public. But seldom is the equation so clear.

You paid for the data.  Your tax dollars fund a massive apparatus of meteorological data collection for reasons ranging from agriculture to disaster safety to keeping airplanes in the air -- everything under the sun. You pay for it and this is just the feds making it available to you on a website. The cost of letting you access it must be minuscule compared to that of collecting it. Indeed, most of the data these other guys sell is stuff they get from the feds or fed-subsidized data collection.

So they're in the business of selling to you the information that your tax dollars already went into collecting. And apparently they add so little added value that they can't handle the competition when the National Weather Service just gives it away. Santorum wants to make these guys into some sort of information age tax farmers.

This article in the Palm Beach Post goes into greater detail on the bill. And you can see from its proponents feeble justifications just what a con this is. They note, for instance, that the bill would not prevent the National Weather Service from alerting the public to imminent disasters, which is awfully generous of them.

Indeed, the executive vice president of AccuWeather, Barry Myers, probably had to have his face specially treated with some sort of fixing agent to prevent him from laughing out loud when he told the Post that the "bill would improve public safety by making the weather service devote its efforts to hurricanes, tsunamis and other dangers, rather than duplicating products already available from the private sector."

In a different era, this would be unbelievable.  Alas, these days it is sadly typical.

Twin trouble for Julian Castro... or honest misunderstanding?

Via Cincinnatus at The Jeffersonian, I learned this morning that the front-running mayoral candidate here in San Antonio is in a bit of hot water as a result of an "appearance" at a Fiesta event earlier this week:

People watching the River Parade on Monday may have thought they were seeing mayoral candidate Julián Castro waving as the San Antonio City Council barge floated down the waterway.

But if they did, they were wrong.

Julián Castro was hosting a neighborhood association meeting that night in District 7, which he still represents. His identical twin brother, Joaquin Castro, was on the boat.

The situation smacked of politicking, said Carroll Schubert, the District 9 city councilman who also is running for mayor.

"When people were yelling 'Julián, Julián,' (Joaquin) was waving madly, and when they announced all of us as council members, he was also waving," Schubert said.

"I think it's deceitful and showed very poor judgment."

Castro said members of the City Council frequently bring family members along on the barge ride, and Joaquin "always" goes along with his councilman brother. But, he added, the two brothers never pretend to be each other.

"Joaquin could never impersonate me. He's not good looking enough," Castro joked.

Unlike Cincinnatus, I don't think this was underhanded, and I don't think it is a big deal, because I do not believe that Castro set out to deceive anyone. 

Julian Castro is the clear frontrunner now, just a couple weeks out from the election, and would have to be politically stupid to pull such a stunt, especially right in front of Schubert, one of his two opponents.  So I actually believe Castro's explanation:

“My brother campaigned for me; he doesn’t campaign as me,” said the mayoral hopeful at the news conference.

He says he planned on going to the parade but attended a neighborhood meeting instead. He says word of his absence failed to get to the announcer, who told the crowd Julián was on board.

Now, with his brother at his side, he finds some humor in looking alike and yet different. They pointed out that Julián has more hair, Joaquin wears his shirts a little baggier, and Julián is five pounds heavier.

“We just hope that everybody understands that we are twins, God made us that way, and our mother is glad to have us that way. It is one of the blessings in life to have a twin, but we never impersonate each other.”

Both of Castro's opponents have leaped on this incident, judging from quotes in the press.  In the article above, Schubert calls Castro's alleged behavior "deceitful" and says it "showed very poor judgement," while in a CNN article Hardberger is paraphrased as calling it dishonest and deceptive.  But such attacks are to be expected of trailing candidates, and are not evidence of anything, in my opinion.

As best I can tell, this was an honest misunderstanding.  The brothers normally attend the event together.  One couldn't make it.  The announcer didn't get the information.  If the non-candidate brother didn't happen to look very similar to the candidate brother, this would never have been a story.

UPDATE:  For completeness, I should add that at this point I have no strong preference between Julian Castro and Phil Hardberger in the race for mayor.  My only preference is that one of those two, and not Carroll Schubert, win.

The corporate welfare "energy bill" and the cycle of corruption

The House GOP, led by Tom DeLay, is about to pass a so-called "energy bill" that primarily consists of handouts of billions of taxpayer dollars to some of the GOP's largest campaign contributors, large energy companies.

President Bush claims that he is mildly displeased with this:

In a move aides described as a shot at House Republicans, Bush said, "With oil at more than $50 a barrel, by the way, energy companies do not need taxpayers'-funded incentives to explore for oil and gas."

Yet nowhere do I see Bush threatening to veto the bill due to this wasteful use of the people's money.  Nowhere do I see him using any leverage he might have to improve the bill.  Quite the contrary.  Instead, he is urging passage of this corporate welfare bill.

President Bush demanded on Wednesday that Congress send a long-stalled energy bill to his desk for signing by the summer, even as he admitted that the legislation would do nothing to lower the rising gasoline prices that polls suggest have cut into his approval ratings.

So why does Bush claim to like the bill? 

... Mr. Bush indicated that in his view the legislation would help the United States overcome the growing worldwide demand for energy and the nation's reliance on foreign oil and would make energy "more affordable and secure" in the future.

Yet the bill will not do any of this either.  Increased subsidies to oil companies will only further this country's dependence on oil, and thus on foreign oil.  No amount of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge can change the fact that the vast majority of the oil on this planet  does not reside in the United States.

Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, estimated that the House bill would provide up to $22 billion to the industry over a decade in the form of tax relief and potential federal aid. He cited one Energy Department estimate that the measure would boost gasoline prices by 3 cents a gallon.

At least one Republican seems to understand the preposterousness of the claims surrounding this bill:

Some Republicans, like Representative Sherwood Boehlert of New York, the chairman of the Science Committee, opposed the measure. In Mr. Boehlert's view, the bill would not reduce oil consumption by a single barrel by 2020. "That is both tragedy and farce," he said.

Sadly, Republicans like Boehlert are few and far between.  Most, it appears would prefer to shower huge amounts of other people's money on their campaign contributors, in exchange for virtually nothing.  OK, it's only the taxpayers getting nothing in return—I'm sure the GOP will be hauling in plenty more campaign contributions in the future from these companies.

And the cycle of corruption continues.

Equal Pay Day and a popular fiction about the wage gap

As many have heard, yesterday was Equal Pay Day. Full-time working women, on average, have to work an en extra three-and-a-half months to earn the same amount of money as full-time working men make in a year.

To all who care about basic fairness, this should be a scandalous situation.  Many people, however, dispute that there is even a problem.  In doing so, they promulgate numerous myths—myths that have seeped into the collective conscience of a large fraction of the country.

One particularly popular myth is that women earn less because many of them take large amounts of time off from their careers to spend at home raising children.  A typical version of this fallacy goes like this:

Consider that women typically take about a decade out of the workforce caring for family. It’s reasonable that a 35-year-old woman reentering the workforce after ten years earns less than a man or woman who worked continuously during that time.

Sadly, this argument isn't just promoted by the pay-gap deniers, who are so common amongst right-wing pundits these days.  I've even seen this raised by those who know the pay gap is a serious problem that needs to be addressed.

Many studies have been done that take differences in experience, education, and numerous other factors into account.  The pay gap between men and women persists even after these factors are included.  For instance, a comprehensive study by the General Accounting Office released in late 2003 reports:

We found that before controlling for any variables that may affect earnings, on average, women earned about 44 percent less than men over the time period we studied—1983 to 2000. However, after controlling for the independent variables that we included in our model, we found that this difference was reduced to about 21 percent over this time period.

The "independent variables" considered in this study include all of the following:  annual hours worked, time out of the labor force, work experience, highest education achieved, full-time versus part-time schedule, length of unemployment, tenure, occupation, industry, self-employment status, and numerous demographic variables.  Yet even after controlling for all these complicating issues, women still earn 21% less than men, a figure barely different from the more simply measured value of 24%.

The idea that the pay gap is due largely to women taking time off to raise children is thus complete fiction.