Do Women Make Less Money? No, Yes, And Then Maybe Yes Again.

The Daily Beast debunks that old canard that women don’t make 77 cents for every dollar that men earn.  As they say, and correctly:

The 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure, or hours worked per week. When all these relevant factors are taken into consideration, the wage gap narrows to about five cents. And no one knows if the five cents is a result of discrimination or some other subtle, hard-to-measure difference between male and female workers.

So it’s not true, and I wish people would stop pushing that bad factoid.
…But on the other hand, it is true in a sense – because if you look at the source of the discrepancy as listed in that very article, it’s basically that “women enter fields that make less money.”  The ten least remunerative (and God, I love that word) majors are dominated by women, whereas the most-lucrative majors are infested with men.
So on the one hand, yes, women don’t make any less when compared to men – they just take crappier jobs.
And why do they take crappier jobs?  Quite possibly because, if you’ve been paying attention at all, the way women are systematically treated in the lucrative technical fields is so hostile that a lot of them quit.  (And that girls are systematically encouraged to not go into those fields by being given different toys, which subtly signal what’s okay for women to do.)
So yeah, trotting out that canard irritates me.  It’s not that if you place a woman next to a man, they earn significantly less* – it’s that women are steered via societal forces towards jobs that pay them less.  And fixing that problem requires a whole bunch of different solutions – ones where we have to look deeper at the questions of what women are encouraged to do, and why, and what can we do to make those careers more welcoming to women.
And – and I wish I could find a link I read a while back – there was a discussion of some of these high-paying and very technical professions, and how in other countries where women do flock to these professions, they tend to get paid less.  The theory was that when women crowd a profession, it becomes viewed as easier to do, and hence gets paid less.  And I can’t find that, so I can’t research it – stupid browser crash – but it passes my sniff test as something that could be true.  After all, nurses often know a hell of a lot more than doctors, but because nurses are largely women, they often get shrugged off as not knowing what they’re doing.  I’d have to look into it more, but who knows?
So there’s a problem.  To my mind, quoting the ol’ “women get paid less” makes the solution seems like a simple thing, as if we just passed a law that smashed wage discrimination this would all go away.  But it won’t.  The issue is more insidious, and deeper; we have layers of incentives and disincentives, in some cases, applied almost from birth, that quietly encourages women to move into fields that will reward them less.
That’s a deeper issue.  You have to combat that with other societal incentives.  And I don’t know all the ways we could fix that, but I’d at least like to see the issue focused on.
* – Which is not to say you can’t find pay disparities if you look for them, but on the whole the problem is different.  If you are saying, “Ferrett is not concerned about women earning less!” then you have clearly turned your brain off for the day.