The Pay Gap

What really bugs me is when people say "no it's not that women are paid less, women just choose to go into lower paying careers."

Okay, fine. Why do women choose that?

In a society that didn't influence people to choose a career based on their gender, you'd expect to see about equal numbers of men and women in high and low paying fields. And that would probably even out the pay gap a little bit. But you don't see that. And don't you dare tell me it's just "biology"- the existence of some men and some women in low and high paying positions, respectively, tells me that people are perfectly capable of performing either kind of work, regardless of their gender or sex.

So maybe women do get paid the same as their male counterparts, when you look at it individually. I can't know that for sure. But what I'm sure anyone can see is that engineering is still "a guy thing" while you see women majoring in arts classes all the time (not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just that based on my life experience, arts graduates make less than engineering graduates), and while female enrollment is increasing for medical school, you still don't see a lot of women in really technical fields like physics, computing, or math. Why is that? It's obviously not because women aren't smart enough, and if you try to tell me THAT, I will kick you in the shin. No. There's got to be some underlying reason why the numbers of men and women in fields like physics aren't equal.

And furthermore, if the numbers of men and women in those fields are equal, why aren't we talking about it?

I just find it hard to believe that the pay gap is solved by "people of different genders choose different career paths." That certain explains why the overall average for women might be lower than the overall average for men, but then you have to go deeper: why is that a fact?

I realize this post is limited because when I talk about high and low paying fields I am thinking in terms of university degrees. This is the environment I was raised in and it's extremely limited and obviously just one piece of a much larger puzzle. But it's all that I know, so it's all I feel I can contribute to the discussion. To talk of career paths that don't involve this would involve a lot of research for me which I currently don't have the time to do, since I'm lucky enough to be pursuing my own university education.

yer pal,
swegan