[morgante]

I'm sympathetic to the notion that discrimination can include subtler factors of pushing women into lower pay positions.

However, the problem with the 77 cent figure is that it's frequently stated like this: "women get paid only 77% of what men do for the same jobs." Which is entirely false. Yet, if you asked most people about the 77 cents figure they'd think it actually meant women got paid much less to do the same work.

If a conversation begins with a lie, it's going to be tough to address a systematic issue and to work together. Distorting the facts is manipulative and prevents rational discourse.

[RodericDay]

There may be some dumb people out there misinterpreting the stat, but there are also an incredible number of people "straw-manning" the ENTIRE opposition as glib.

For example, I've seen people cite the White House page as "fallen to the delusion", when in fact it is quite explicit:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/equal-pay

> In 2014, the typical woman working full-time all year in the United States earned only 79 percent of what the typical man earned working full-time all year. Phrased differently, she earned 79 cents for every dollar that he earned. The pay gap is even greater for African-American and Latina women, with African-American women earning 64 cents and Latina women earning 56 cents for every dollar earned by a white non-Hispanic man. Decades of research shows that no matter how you evaluate the data, there remains a pay gap — even after factoring in the kind of work people do, or qualifications such as education and experience — and there is good evidence that discrimination contributes to the persistent pay disparity between men and women. In other words, pay discrimination is a real and persistent problem that continues to shortchange American women and their families.

There is absolutely no lie or imprecision there. It is a common rhetorical trick to tar your entire opposition as idiots. The people claiming that the pay gap is a "myth" are just as just as zealot-like as the people misinterpreting the 77c figure.

[whatok]

The only thing it is explicit about is that full-time working women as a whole get paid less than men. There is a vague assertion towards the fact that a gap still exists "after factoring in the kind of work people do, or qualifications such as education and experience" but no numbers are provided.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that women as a whole get paid less than men and that minority women even more so. What I have an issue with is that by being purposefully vague, proponents are acting like employers somehow just hate women so much that they become blinded by this hatred and throw all business-sense out the window by deciding to pay men a load more than women. It's completely dishonest, proposed "solutions" only serve as a band-aid fix, and distracts from the actual issues at hand.

[lukeschlather]

All the information we have is hourly wage, income, and job title. We can't know if a woman with the lower-paid job title of "Programmer Analyst" is doing the same work as a man with a job title of "Senior Software Engineer."

The "same job" is a subjective distinction, so you can't say it's entirely false; it's really a matter of opinion.

[morgante]

> The "same job" is a subjective distinction, so you can't say it's entirely false; it's really a matter of opinion.

No, it's not. Certainly there are some distinctions at the margins, as you note.

There are, however, some very clear distinctions. Women dominate elementary education, which I hope we can all agree is a very different job than programming (for example).

To reiterate, I don't know whether these preferences are innate or learned. In fact, I suspect it's the latter. But we shouldn't ignore them_if women were in fact paid less for doing the exact same jobs, solution would actually be a lot easier.