ASHE SCHOW: Some good, some bad in Ivanka Trump’s defense of her father’s family leave plan.

Ivanka has been a great asset to her father’s campaign, especially when it comes to women and family issues. That said, she makes one of the common mistakes when discussing statistics about gender pay equity.

“For me, motherhood is a gift and a tremendous source of joy,” she writes. “Yet it’s also the greatest predictor of wage inequality in our country,” Ivanka writes at the beginning of her article. “In 2014, single women without children earned 94 cents on a man’s dollar. Married mothers made only 81 cents.”

Ivanka doesn’t explain why this wage gap actually exists, let alone the fact that it seems to contradict the more commonly used (and even more misleading) statistic that hints at even lower pay for women compared to men.

It’s not that men and women are working side-by-side doing the same job and being paid unequally (even if that happens in some places). Men and women choose different careers, work different hours, and often have different levels of experience.

The reason married mothers earned 81 cents to the dollar that men earned is because so many married mothers leave the labor force when they have a child. That drops the average earnings if they go back to work later compared to single women. Or they work fewer hours or take a less time-consuming job, which generally pays less.

That said, there is some good in Donald’s plan. Allowing working parents to deduct child care expenses is a good idea. Society should value parenthood more. Parents are shouldering many expenses now that prevent the state from having to pay more later. Anything that helps them cover those expenses without being taxed on the extra money they have to earn to pay the costs of raising a family is a good idea.

Read the whole thing.