The Skeptics Are Wrong — the Gender Pay Gap Is Very Very Real - Yglesias
Controversial as Vox, and Yglesias are, they hit this on the head:
The bottom line
Life is complicated. Any summary statistic is, by definition, going to be an effort to simplify that reality. And it is absolutely true to say that pay discrimination on the part of employers between the women they employ and the men they employ only accounts for a minority of the gap. But the statistical controls that reveal that don’t make the problem of the wage gap go away. They help us identify where it exists. Some of it exists inside the companies where women work. Some of it exists inside household dynamics and broad social expectations of how family life should work. And some of it exists at the level of occupations, where women’s job opportunities are structured in an economically unhelpful way.
The US has a bigger gender wage gap than most other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an organization of developed countries. Among 28 nations for which the OECD has data, the US as of 2010 had the fifth largest wage gap, tied with four other countries.
American full-time, year-round working women earned 19 percent less than their male counterparts — the same gap as seen in Austria, Finland, Canada and Switzerland. The gap for all 28 nations together, meanwhile, was 15 percent. The smallest gap — in Hungary, Poland and Spain — was 6 percent.
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