How often do we hear the same old meme "but, but women aren't paid less if you compare like with like".
Yeah really, well here is an article [linked above] on Forbes that cuts that meme to shreds, from cradle to grave women are undervalued by discrimination.
In fact, in comparing the salaries of men and women with comparable education in comparable fields just one year out of college, it’s plain to see that when it comes to paying off student loan debt and getting ahead financially, Caitlin—and all women—are much worse off. Men and women pay the same amount for college, but the rewards they reap are very, very different.
The argument always stems around different degrees and choice of career, but the article also deals with this.
Among men and women with the same major and comparable jobs working the same number of hours each week, women’s pay still lags behind men’s by 7% (or 93 cents to the dollar).
So being a women automatically comes with a 7% handicap.
Your starting salary follows you all the way through your career. Your earning potential determines how quickly you get out of debt and how much money you will have for retirement.
I suggest you read the linked study as well
The pay gap has far-reaching consequences for women and their families. According to one estimate, college-educated women working full time earn more than a half million dollars less than their male peers do over the courseof a lifetime (Carnevale,
Rose, & Cheah, 2011). Having less money means that women have more limited choices. The pay gap influences the neighborhoods in which women live, the educational opportunities they offer their children, and the food they put on their tables. The pay gap can have especially dire consequences for single mothers, since they are often the only breadwinners for their families
So hopefully we will
hear less of this type of tripe
And that’s what is so dismally silly about this report. They have forgotten about age cohorts. They are comparing all women in the working population with all men. When we know that women currently coming to the end of their working lives were discriminated against in a manner that those starting them are currently not. So we cannot take the gender pay gap of current senior executives of being indicative of what is going to happen to the current generation of 20 years olds. But that’s exactly what they do: something which is, as I’ve now said a number of times, dismally silly.
Like hell we will, it is all they have got.