Equal Pay Day highlights continuing income disparity between men and women

What's especially frustrating about people who try to decry the wage gap as a myth is that they seem to think that everything exists in a vacuum. That women "choose" lower-paying jobs because they simply prefer to do work for less money, or that women are "afraid" of doing more labor-intensive professions like construction.

That second argument is particularly laughable, since a traditionally "pink collar" job like housekeeping is hardly cushy or physically undemanding, but the first seeks to ignore the many societal and psychological pressures on women that may lead to a perceived choice.

Skeptics of the wage gap might as well just come out and say what they're really thinking -- namely that women don't deserve equal pay, rather than the ludicrous argument that we don't want it.

All this whining over equal pay. You want equal pay - work equally as hard, for as many hours, in equally difficult and strenuous jobs! It's that easy... @ Sarah Siegel, are you actually suggesting, in all seriousness, that 'housekeeping' is on par with manual construction!? Seriously?

All these erroneous female arguments - so irrational and baseless! It's a bit like listening to a stroppy child of 6 attempting to convince an adult of unfair treatment. Women, you really do yourselves a disservice when you trench this stuff up!

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I would feel more comfortable supporting equal pay for equal work if I knew that on average a man's pocketbook was not an important consideration in a woman's choice of a romantic partner.

While there are indeed a few female lawyers who marry male poets, (who stay home and raise the kids) they remain the distinct minority.

If only I could keep down-voting your comment until it fell off the page. What part of the word 'statistics' do you not understand?

These studies don't compare a lawyer's salary to a housekeeper's. Equal pay for equal work means that a man and a woman, doing THE SAME JOB (same work, same hours) and possessing the same qualifications, should earn the same wage.

If you read the article, academic studies controlling for factors that would justify salary increases still find that men get paid more for doing the SAME JOB. In other words, after all possible reasons for why one candidate might be given a raise over another are removed from the table, men make higher salaries for no other apparent reason other than that they are men. It's a systemic legacy bias.

Incidentally, @Hazlit, think about it. As women used to make far less than men, or were expected to stay at home raising children and not work at all, a man's income was an important aspect for choosing a mate. That's an unfortunate practical consequence of the traditional patriarchal system that established men as the primary economic beneficiaries in society.

Things have begun to change, but the push towards equality really only took off during the Baby Boomer era, and systemic inequality cannot be eradicated in a single generation.

SO, women continue to be overrepresented in traditionally gendered, lower paying jobs AND earn less even when they're doing the exact same jobs as men.

Men sometimes continue to be assessed by female partners for their earning potential and ability to provide economic security, but here's the thing ...

If you want this to change, you should fully support equal pay for equal work, which would make women economically independent of men and lay the groundwork for a shift in societal thinking that will alter the stereotypes and expectations of both femininity and masculinity.

@Read, people

So if I support equal pay for equal work female lawyers marrying male poets will become the norm?

"Female managers over the age of 40 earn, on average, 35 percent less than men."

How to lie with statistics, or rather, how to cherry pick the numbers you need to continue your little "quest".

Societal changes are generational, that you will find older people with a bigger disparity is not a surprise, the question is does someone who gets newly hired getting discriminated against? The answer to that is pretty much no. We have laws, we have the "awareness" of it.

Of course with all that in place you can do what Pao is doing at Reddit right now and just ban salary negotiations because, in her own words: Women suck at negotiating their own salary, so now nobody gets to negotiate and the company gets to keep the difference. I am sure the Shareholders approve and we have another "win" for female empowerment. If you can't "step up" then you make sure that nobody else can either. Equality for all!

No gender gap, you say? Well, let’s talk about it when you see an evident statistics about the way gender highlights debt inequality. Fascinating facts, by the way. This review http://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-in-debt/demographics/ shows how ridiculously uneven the debts between men and women, considering the volume of contribution from each part: “while women attend college in larger numbers and earn higher grades than men, their earnings one year after graduation are lower than those of their male peers. Recent female graduates earn only 82 percent of what recent male graduates earn. The pay gap follows women throughout their careers, as raises tend to be based on previous salaries”. This is an official review, nothing personal. Even though the employment environment today gets more flexible and presents more equal opportunities for the whole new generation of employees regardless gender (read more about the modification in this field and curious prospects in the article http://loansmob.com/employment/ about modern employment), it’s evident, that as soon as statistics keeps on showing that Equal Pay Day is needed, more attention should be put into this issue.

@oh good lord ladies! -- There have been many studies performed which show that even in circumstances where women work harder than their male counterparts, they are routinely rewarded less often and to a lesser degree.

Perhaps more tellingly, other studies have shown that when a woman stays late or performs tasks above and beyond her job description, these efforts are seen as less important or less consequential than when a man does the exact same thing to the exact same degree.

The fact is that an enormous bias exists which says that women's efforts are less important or less valuable -- and that bias naturally affects salary. Sure, there are lazy women and there are hard-working men, but the evidence does not support the belief that men are paid more and women are paid less because the men consistently work harder.