Patricia Arquette is being slammed from both the Left and the Right for her comments during and after her acceptance speech for the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

From the Left, the criticism has come largely from other disadvantaged groups who feel that her focus was too narrowly on women’s issues, especially in a year in which the nominees for the Academy Awards included almost no people of color.

But from the Right, the criticism was directed more at the basic validity of what she was saying. An item in the Los Angeles Times includes this illustration of that criticism: “On “Fox & Friends” on Monday morning, the actress and pundit Stacey Dash slammed Arquette for the issue, saying she was ‘appalled’ by the moment and admonished her for not ‘do[ing] her history’ on the 1963 Equal Pay Act.’” [The full article is available at: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-oscars-patricia-arquette-speech-equal-pay-20150223-story.html]

Well, it is pretty clear that Stacey Dash ought to do more than read the legislation that is now more than 50 years old—and that clearly hasn’t accomplished what it was intended to accomplish.

She ought to take a look at an article by Andy Kiersz that appeared in Business Insider this morning. Titled “The Gender Pay Gap Is Bad in Some States and Worse In Others,” the article includes this map measuring state by state the average salaries of female vs male workers:

The statistics come from the Census Bureau’s most recent American Community Survey (a link is provided in the article). Kiersz’s article also includes a chart of the exact statistics for each state. The complete article is available at: http://www.businessinsider.com/gender-pay-gap-state-map-2015-2

I’d like to add that 17 of the 24 “right to work” states rank in the lowest three categories, while only eight of the 26 pro-labor states have such dismal rankings.