Do you believe the gender gap is real?

[nclib]

Absolutely. Yes, there are some different choices of men and women, that lead to different pay (which I don't think is coincidental to gender). But it is not just this.

Even if pay discrimination were only due to the motherhood penalty (it's not), this still would be discrimination. If we take the perspective (I don't) that mothers are/should be more responsible for childrearing than fathers, and therefore have less time/energy to devote to work, this would simply that fathers are still doing more childrearing than childless men (and supposedly therefore less dependable at work). But not only do fathers not lose money after their child is born, they actually gain money.

[MarkD]

Yes, I believe it's real, but no, I haven't personally experienced it and seen it. I believe it's real because of the discussion about it, and because of common sense.

[Del Tachi]

The more importance gender gap to talk about with regards to success in life is the variance gap rather than the success gap.  Man generally fail a lot more but also succeed way more. The vast majority of prisoners and homeless people are male but also so are most CEO's.  There probably is a pretty strong variance gap in the population.

This is because men are less risk-averse than women.  Even within the same career paths, men are likelier to engage in more aggressive risk-seeking behavior than women.  This risk-seeking behavior generates divergent outcomes.  A great example of this is the academic publication gap; male researchers publish more frequently and in better journals than female researchers because novel identification or experimental methods (which are inherently riskier) are more attractive to peer reviewers.  .

[dead0man]

Careful guys, Larry Summers got fired from Harvard for saying facts like this out loud in ....holy crap, 2006.

[The Undefeatable Debbie Stabenow]

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over-a-male-dominated-field-the-pay-drops.html

This is mandatory reading on the subject. It's true that blatant wage discrimination (i.e. an employer consciously paying his female employees a lesser wage than his male employees for the exact same work) only constitutes a small part of the "75-80 cents per dollar" figure that is commonly cited; studies in the article suggest that this only explains about one-third of this gap. However, gender is still an undeniable factor when it comes to the part of that statistic that isn't accounted for by wage discrimination. Historically, as the share of women in a specific field of work increases, the real wages for those positions decrease, and the opposite happens for men. The article also cites lots of examples of female-dominated professions that require nearly identical qualifications and work as male-dominated professions but reap noticeably lower wages; it's rarely (or never?) the other way around.

[jaymichaud]

Yes there is a pay gap but there are various outside factors that contribute to it, some of which are societal. It’s not a matter of flat out paying women less for the same job which has been illegal in the West for 40 to 50-odd years.

[RINO Tom]

Of course it's "real," and I haven't heard that many people deny that.  The debate is what to do about it and how much of it is caused by blatant, rampant sexism flourishing in workplaces all across America.  Due to the sexism of past decades and the societal structure (especially pre-reliable birth control) that pressured women to "work in the home," a lot more men are in senior positions and/or have had positions with companies longer than women who "do the same job."  My last company rewarded seniority quite highly, including with women, but there were simply more men who'd been there longer.  A "Vice President of Commercial Banking" is an umbrella term for "the same job" ... but if a man has held that title for eight years vs. a woman holding it for four, he's going to make significantly more.

Is that sexism?  Maybe an effect of decades of institutional sexism, at best, but it's not some sly, wink-wink structure to purposely exclude women.  This won't be popular on the woke internet, but frankly we'll know a lot more about how pervasive literal gender discrimination in the workplace is in about ten years, and my wager is that it's a lot less than you would think.

Disclaimer: Things like penalizing a woman for being out of work due to pregnancy (usually done in accidental and totally legal ways) IS an example of legitimate gender discrimination that needs addressed, and there are plenty of things like this.  However, most people imagine a bunch of old, sexist White men who just don't want to pay women ... and that's frankly hilariously overblown, haha.

[Meclazine for Israel]

It's real.

Unfortunately, men are more likely to be sociopathic and controlling, fantastic qualities to climb the management ladder.

The boss at my last job was laid back, relaxed and never made any decisions. But one decision he did make was to employ a geological consultant who was a bonafide sociopath. This consultant was 100% confident, knew everything, talked down to everyone.

Within 18 months, this guy climbed the ladder and became an executive of the company two jobs above my boss.

Unfortunately, these qualities also explain why most mass shooters and serial killers are men.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Yes, for employed Americans. Men still make more than women, that's definitely true.

However, as Averroes somewhat sardonically alluded to, the gender gap if anything, goes in the other direction for Americans unemployed or out of the labor force. And even for those working in low-wage jobs, I'm not convinced that the situation for men is distinctively better than for women; employers in the US have a long history of using women (among others, e.g. immigrants, "people of color", and so on) as strikebreakers or for undermining the wages of (white, native-born) men.

Furthermore, if you look at the situation for black Americans in particular, I can't see how anyone can credibly argue that men have it better off economically than women - particularly when educational attainment is taken into account, and we know what affect having a college degree has on economic (and overall) success, and that women are doing much better than men on the educational field these days.

It's almost as if there are real class differences in the experiences and outcomes regarding this subject...

[Libertas Vel Mors]

It's not really up for debate even at this point. Every single credible study taken has shown that such differences as exist exist because of different life choices, and I can't say that's really surprising. Generally speaking, men tend to be more money focused (why every single person I've met who was both under 18 and wanted to go into finance or the law etc etc has been male) and women tend to be more emotionally focused (why I've never met a guy who wanted to be a veterinarian or something). This is one of the classic liberal vs conservative divides -- ie liberals being upset that men and women on average earn different amounts of money, while conservatives point out that it is a result of their own choices, but I still find it fascinating just how many people still believe in it despite all the evidence to the contrary.

[Libertas Vel Mors]

A better question is why it is that female-dominated careers tend to pay poorly, rather than why it is that women tend to go into less-remunerative careers. There's no ironclad culture-independent reason why, say, an English teacher should be paid less than a cybersecurity guy.

Actually, there is. It is called supply and demand. A lot more people want and are able to serve as English teachers than cybersecurity guys, so cybersecurity guys make more. It really isn't too complicated.