Let's look at the idea itself: what is the gender wage gap? The gender wage gap is a supposed discrepancy in the amount of money women and men get paid for work. Several sources have been used to promote the idea of a gender wage gap, and most of these sources claim the gap is due to gender discrimination in the work place. Other sources claim that this gap is not due to discrimination, and instead involves many other factors that are often ignored in the first assumption. I am of the latter persuasion.
Why is the gender wage gap a myth? Using the simple description I gave above, the gap seems to be real. When you take the average income over a lifetime for a man and a woman and compare them, you will find that the average accumulated income for a man is higher. This happens for many reasons, however, but not due to gender discrimination. The factors that many people choose to ignore when looking at average income between women and men is the tendency for women to take lower-risk (and therefore lower-paying) jobs than men, who often take higher-paying and higher-risk jobs. Women are also more likely than men to take time off of work for child rearing than men. There are also more men in very high places in large corporations due to having had decades of work opportunities to propel them to that point: opportunities that women have not had for as long. Additionally, the tendency for more women to go out and get jobs has grown in the past four decades, but there are still a good number of women who are working now who didn't when they had families at home. Even waiting until their children were in school, such mothers would have had less time to work over the course of their lifetime, leading to additional changes in their lifetime earnings. Additionally, female business owners are more likely to work hours that allow them to raise their kids than men are, leading to a further impact on wages. These factors will influence the lifetime earnings of the average woman far more than whatever discrimination exists today. When looking at these factors and others, the American Association of University Women found only a 6.6 cent difference between what men and women are paid, in favor of men. However, their research grouped certain professions together that have huge differences in what they pay (lawyer and librarian, for example). When looking at people in better-organized categories, this 6.6 cent difference drops significantly. When considering that the wage difference is so low, it becomes statistically insignificant. Therefore, the gender wage gap is a myth.
Many have argued, though, that while the gap is not caused by discrimination from bosses, it is caused by discrimination in our society. This is partially true. Women are encouraged by our society to take up jobs such as teaching and nursing, while men are more encouraged to things like engineering and construction. Women are encouraged more to raise their kids than men are, and men are heavily ridiculed if they want to be a stay-at-home-dad by their peers. There is pressure under both women and men to take up jobs that are 'appropriate' for our genders, and all of us have to face hurdles created by those pressures. As such, these societal pressures need to be lifted to allow everyone to pursue the job they wish.
While the societal pressure exists, the pressure is more to fit in with what our society wants, and those wants stem from basic instinctual desires that we have no control over. Women are, in general, more driven to taking care of children than men, while men are the greater risk takers. This stems from how our species reproduces and raises our young, and will not change so long as we reproduce in the way that we do. It's these tendencies that as often, if not more so, drive women to take jobs like teachers and nurses and drive men to take jobs like cops and fire fighters than any societal pressure. Even if we lived in a utopian world where we were encouraged to do whatever we wanted, we would still gravitate toward careers based on our instincts, and this difference in lifetime wages would remain.
Looking at a man and a woman who have the same job, in the same company, with the same level of skill and education, and with the same hours, the man and woman will earn the same amount. The gender wage gap is nothing more than a myth, and is an obstacle to subjects of real concern to gender equality, such as what I'll talk about next time.
