Thoughtful Quora thing

“On average, full-time working women earn just 78 cents for every dollar a man earns.”

I hate this statement with all my liberal feminist heart.

It is not false. Women in the work force, as a whole, on average, do get paid less than men. But the reason, or more like complicated social economical historical REASONS, are much more nuanced. And it certainly isn't “men get paid more than women for an equal job.” (except for few outliers in Hollywood, but the successful actors are all grossly overpaid, I have no sympathy for their “struggle").

Men and women are being paid the same wage for the same work. We have laws which guarantee that (The Equal Pay Act of 1963).

But why, despite equal pay for equal work, women still get paid less?

One, female oriented careers (teacher, nurses, secretaries, waitstaff…) are generally paid less compared to male orientated careers. This is true to all people (regardless of gender) working in the career. A male teacher suffers the same sexism dominating the occupation as the female teacher.

Two, in each career, males are more likely to be promoted than females.

It could be conventionally we are conditioned to perceive male workers to be more capable even when they're equally capable to female workers.
It could also be that female workers are often required (or automatically assigned) to be the primary caretaker of children and household, which takes away their capacity to devote to work (like do over time or travel). As a result, female workers are seen to be “less ambitious", “more family orientated"; while male workers are seen to be more “driven", more “dedicated".
As a result, if said occupation has an equal amount of male and female workers, you see more males in higher paid management levels, more females in lower paid worker levels.
This is true even for female oriented occupations like teachers, school administrators are more likely to be male.
Three, many high paying careers are notoriously sexist towards women and create a very toxic working environment. This ranges from traditional union jobs (electrician, drilling rig workers…etc) and career military, to STEM and High tech fields, finance/investment, politics. On top of already highly competitive work, women also need to deal with harassment, condescending/patronizing attitudes (based on their gender), constantly needing to justify their capabilities or credentials, being shut down at meetings or talked over, walking the fine line of being ignored or being too bossy/bitchy.

You could argue that male workers often deal with similar attitudes, of condescending or needing to justify their qualification, but I bet in most cases, it's not because of their gender.

I recently watched a lovely Anime called Aggretsuko, which depicted a regular office worker’s life. One thing that really stands out for me is how the title character, Retsuko had faced so much sexism at work from her boss, she saw getting married as her way out of this toxic environment. While I personally wouldn't make that choice, I can relate to that feeling so much.

Gender pay gap is not a myth. It does exist. And a lot of it, like conservatives often enjoy talking about, is because women themselves made the choice to put their family first, or chose to work in a field that paid less (like nurse vs doctors, or teacher vs manager). From there, many would come to the conclusion that women, on average, are not suitable for certain careers. But that rhetoric also oversimplifies the issues behind it, the larger more prevalent and more subtle, more sinister, patriarchal social structure.

And the rhetoric of how women on average get paid less isn't helping with the struggle. It opens the door to easy attacks from the conservatives, and it glides over the reason for these issues.

So when you listen to regular liberal and conservative talk about this issue, you'd think liberals believe there exists a simple solution and conservatives are just too evil to do it, while conservative believe facts have proven that women just aren't suitable to do certain jobs and liberals are just too blind to see it.

Both miss the point by a hundred miles.

This rhetoric, while true, doesn't help the discussion at all.