The main reason why women still get paid less on average than men is not that they are paid less for the same jobs but that they tend not to climb so far up the career ladder, or they choose lower-paid occupations, such as nursing and teaching. That is confirmed by other studies. Among the jobs where women with college degrees earn at least as much as men are computer engineer, petroleum engineer, and a variety of other engineering occupations, as well as journalist, portfolio manager and medical technologist. But in most of these jobs, especially most engineering jobs, there are fewer women than men. The most important reason why women earn less than men is not that they are paid less for doing the very same work but that they are distributed differently among jobs and have fewer hours and less continuity in the labor force. Among college-educated, never-married individuals with no children who worked full-time and were from 40 to 64 years old—that is, beyond the child-bearing years—men averaged $40,000 a year in income, while women averaged $47,000. But, despite the fact that women in this category earned more than men in the same category, gross income differences in favor of men continue to reflect differences in work patterns between the sexes, so that women and men are not in the same categories to the same extent.
A quote from this book with regards to the gender pay gap. Beyond my personal, narrow anecdotal experience where I have seen some slight forms of sexism in the workplace, I’ve always wondered what are the statistics on this. It also doesn’t help that engineering jobs (especially in software) are some of the fastest growing jobs (in terms of salary increases) and way more men gravitate towards that industry.
Lower hours spent working, leading to lower pay, could be a choice of the woman herself, or could also be a “forced choice” due to parenthood and pregnancy. The thing is, many factors confound the data and that’s probably why we have such diverse opinions on this topic.
