http://www.payscale.com/gender-lifetime-earnings-gap?r=1
Linked from the front page of a known conservative circle jerk (Reddit)
I really enjoy you posting things that back up what the majority of gender gap proponents claim. The issue is only part head to head comparisons. The larger issue, which your link backs up, is this idea that women "gravitate" towards certain professions. It blatantly ignores the sociological factors which are at play. Then showing the absurdity even further, we see that many of these jobs which are held up as near head to head comparisons are held by men 90% of the time. Because, ya know, women don't like computers and sciencey things. Next talking point will be about oh women just don't work hard enough to get promotions to executive levels or that women want to take time off their careers so they aren't worthy of promotion.
Do you truly believe that men and women are totally equal, (Equal as in drawn to the same things, having the same strengths and weaknesses, etc.) and the sociological factors are what cause all of these differences? I'd argue that it is even more absurd to ignore genetic differences?
Not saying that at all, and you've taken my post to an extreme that I would obviously never argue. Of course there are certain differences between the two sexes at a biological level. But the sociological constructs also play into how women pick careers, and that is unarguably more important for me in this issue. Look at the language used to construct these arguments. Gendered language, talking about women being better suited for certain careers or that women naturally don't take to certain topics. The easiest example to me in this differentiation is medicine where women are 'naturally suited' to be nurses because they are supposed to be caring and nurturing whereas men 'should be' doctors because of their gravitation towards the sciences or because they have the mental fortitude to deal with the job's stresses.
But lets look further at various studies about female performance in high stress high wage jobs. Women who are seen as aggressive in the work place are often accused of being overly aggressive or bitchy. Men are excused as being competitors driven to succeed. Women have negative pressure put on them from even entering into these jobs. While schooling has improved, the hard sciences, engineering, and computer related fields are still overly dominated by men. Its clear that these are not because of genetic differences but a system which for decades drove women away from hard sciences.
The other issue which has some backing are promotion systems which value the labor of women less because of the potential 'risk' of pregnancy and child care. That has been one reason pointed to for why women have been putting off having families till later in life, career improvement that is. But lets not forget that the US lags behind the rest of the developed world in things like access to paid maternity leave, child care, and healthcare. All of these factor into women being marginalized in the work place if they want to have a career and a family.
While idiots like KSUW want to control for any factor which implicitly proves their position in error, a simple logical look at the facts shows that women do have a disadvantage on average in either access to jobs or payment and advancement in those jobs. Individual cases of women advancing in boardrooms are the exception not the rule.
