The "wage gap" is the one I see most often. It's presented in a way that makes it seem like women get paid significantly less than men, but in reality there's almost no gap when you account for the same position and experience level.
It's rather specious reasoning at it's surface, as adding additional controls that reduces variance in the model doesn't discount that there is discrimination within the labour market. That is to say, the discrimination happens elsewhere in the chain, possibly at at the education level (women pushed out of higher income degree streams), the on the job mentor discrimination (women are less likely to be 'picked' to be mentored), or due to the lack of a comprehensive childcare support system pushes women to lower income jobs or do not have the ability to rise in those jobs.
There are no simple answers as "hey, when we control for x, y, z the wage gap disappears", as these are almost inscrutably complex systems.
Women do get paid significantly less than men though. The statistic doesn't lie. We've decided to pay less for the jobs that women typically take. And they are less likely to get the same positions as men and are also therefore denied the same experience.
- not women, but mothers get significantly less payed on average than the rest of people, in fact, young women are paid more than young men.
- women on average prefer to work with people and men - with things. Working with things scales well (like IT), working with people - doesnt scale well (nurse, teacher, doctor).
* Mothers are paid significantly less on average but fathers aren't and there are deep cultural dynamics that perpetuate this. There isn't a fundamental reason this should be the case.
* Women (and men obviously too but we're talking about women) are conditioned constantly from birth to have those preferences and have to deal with pressure from everyone in their lives to not deviate from what's expected from them. (Same with men too -- try being a manly man who wants to bake wedding cakes or go into fashion.) And then when women try to be mold breakers and go into "masculine fields" they're pushed away and become lower status.
i'm not interested to argue about the first point.
Re the 2nd - I can come up with an argument supporting my theory that it is not only a social construct as you imply, but I will invite you first to prove your theory that this is ONLY a social conditioning of a woman that makes her make these choices, and there is no biology involved into that (Or very little).
To shade a shadow on your theory (as i assume this is a social construct theory) i recall some info that female orangutans were more interested in dolls and males - in more male toys similar to humans.
Also, in Scandinavian countries that ran out their way to make their societies egalitarian, even more women were choosing "traditional female" jobs than what the "social constructionists" were trying to achieve by their "gender equality" agenda.
But i will not argue about all of this as it is all well known and documented and people just need to make a 3h research on the internet.
It seems to be a bit silly to say that the wage gap "doesn't exist" when you're talking about something completely different that what is meant by the wage gap in the first place.
Women as a class of people make around 30% less than men. If you don't think this is surprising you should. There's nothing inherent to men and women that would lead you to predict this. And, in fact, looking at the data you might actually expect that women as as class would make more than men because women have higher college graduation rates, and "go further" in higher education on average.
All of the things that "explain" the gap are literally the problems. Just because we have strong evidence that we know what some of the factors that lead to the gap are doesn't mean you throw up your hands and say, "that's just how men and women are I guess."
Yes! Of course! I could rant forever about how schools do a disservice to boys leading to fewer of them to go to college and its not like the the problems magically disappear in college.
My point is that this imbalance with wages is that much more surprising because of this other imbalance that seems like it would favor women in skilled fields.
Maternity is probably the greatest factor. I know several women who wanted to stay home after having a kid. Suppose they return to work in 5-10 years, they're less experienced than others of the same age, and have stale professional contacts.
The problem is that you would expect that over billions of people maternity and paternity would average out but it doesn't because of societal pressure. Men who stay at home are "low status" and women who don't are bad mothers. The problem is the social dynamic that creates these "preferences."
Instead of societal pressure try billions of years of evolution and the fact that women physically carry the child for 9 months before their body is utterly changed by giving birth. Societal pressures... For crying out loud. Sometimes things are as obvious as they seem.
Actually, in the instances I'm aware of it was the reverse: family and society pressured the women to return to work but they didn't want to. If a mother wants to stay home, why not just respect her preference without questioning her "real" motives?
I think you're confusing the preferences of a woman and the preferences of women. It should be perfectly normal for either mother or father to stay home with their kids if they want and that preference should be respected absolutely.
But then you have to zoom out a little bit and ask why you see so few men become stay at home fathers or househusbands compared to women and is the explanation a problem? Why don't men feel like they can be homemakers or take on the primary caregiver role for their kids? Why do so many women take on those roles? If the answer is really always voluntary preference then maybe it's not an issue but that's unfortunately not the case and the pressure and judgement imparted by society for people to conform to their "roles" creates this dynamic and is bad for everyone.
It is not the present social dynamic that creates these "preferences".
This set of characteristics has evolved over millions of years, beginning before humans had even branched off the evolutionary tree.
> In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks.
