Where does the gender pay gap exist?

The claim that there is still a 'gender wage gap' is made based on a collection of circumstantial evidence and improperly collected statistics that result from 'studies' tailored to have the result that supports the narrative.

For example: One study compared the compensation of all people that work at one particular hospital and determined that 'men make more than women'. Conclusive? Not so much. They did not factor in that most of the women employed at that hospital were administrative assistants or nurses while most of the men employed were doctors. I would expect a doctor to make more than a nurse or a secretary, but that doesn't support the narrative, so the study didn't bother to differentiate between the different positions.

Another study claims the fact that more women were attending colleges and getting better grades than men, but that men were still making more money upon graduation as PROOF of a 'gender wage gap'. What they failed to mention is that while there are more women than men attending college, and women are making better grades on average than men, it is because women are pursuing easier majors than men that usually pay less upon graduation. Women predominantly pursue careers in education or liberal arts whereas the STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields are still dominated by men. It is easier to get an 'A' in Shakespeare than it is in Thermodynamics. What is going to pay better-- A kindergarten teacher or an aerospace engineer?

When you do try to compare apples to apples, the gap does exist to some extent but is based on personal individual choices rather than some anti-woman conspiracy. A couple things to consider:
Disclaimer: Please accept that I am speaking in broad generalizations which obviously to NOT describe all circumstances for all individuals. I am not discounting that many exceptions to these societal generalizations exist.

1. Men are more likely than women to negotiate a higher salary or a raise. For the same justification that "women should never buy a car without a man", men are generally more argumentative where women are generally more averse to confrontation. Women are more likely to accept the salary offered, whereas men are more likely to negotiate for a higher salary. That explains the entry-level wage gap.

2. Men are more likely to be willing to travel and work longer hours or more unusual hours than women. This is a consequence of both the 'single-focus' mentality innate to men's brain function (women have multi-focus brains) and the fact that women remain the primary caregivers to children and the maintainers of the home even when children are not present which impacts their career flexibility. When it comes time for promotions, it is all about face-time. The employee who stayed late or accompanied the boss on the business trip has had more face-time with the boss than the employee who never had that one-on-one time because they are only at the office when everyone else is also at the office. This willingness to 'go the extra mile' is largely reminiscent of a time when men were the primary breadwinners and women were the primary homemakers, and the survival of the family depended completely upon the man's ability to be successful. Just because society shifted to the 'working woman', it didn't get rid of a man's laser-focus on pursuing opportunities at work in order to be a better provider.

3. Much like #2, people's choices can lead to a pay disparity over time. If a woman chooses to have a child, she is going to be out of work for 6-12 weeks minimum. Many large companies offer up to a year off for new mothers with either all or partial pay. A man doesn't have to take that time off. It isn't patrimony, it is biology. Dad doesn't have to recover from being ripped open, and dad can't breastfeed. Having a child is a choice. It does have career consequences than men don't have to deal with, but it is a choice. It is disingenuous to claim some misogynistic conspiracy is responsible for a pay disparity that exists because of individual choices made by the complainant-- but it fits the narrative, so it gets legitimized.

The only legitimately apples-to-apples comparison of college graduates to compensation I've seen-- same degrees, same job title, same amount of time at the company-- actually showed women making slightly MORE than men across the board. (Although I'm a little upset because the study did not offer speculation as to why the disparity existed at all, or what field they focused on. Would have liked to been able to dig deeper into the data on that one.) What changes is the choices those people make along their careers that leads to a disparity-- if one manifests at all.

At the end of the day-- all the people screaming 'wage gap' apparently do not know that there are ALREADY FEDERAL LAWS ON THE BOOKS which prevent wage discrimination. If someone truly thinks she is being discriminated against, she can use the laws that exist to challenge it. But calmly informing someone that the solution to their manifested crisis already exists doesn't rile the masses into a voting frenzy.

I do apologize for not being able to document any of my sources on this. This has been a years' long pet research project of mine and I cannot possibly remember specific sources. While I would certainly not encourage anyone to believe whatever they read on the internet, the only 'proof' or validation of this information I can provide is that I believe it to be true as a result of my own research. Not trying to 'change' anyone's mind with unsourced information other than to offer an alternative to the popular narrative and encourage others to see that there is another side to the story.

LCDR (Join to see) - in all 3 of your examples have I personally have not seen it affect the actual pay of a women. I believe when it comes down to it in 2018 successful people will be paid what they are worth. Thank you for all of your input.

I would make one change to your statement: Successful people will be paid what they are willing to work for. (Hard to quantify a person's 'worth', but I know what you are saying.) You're welcome.

Case in point, I am at a coference for work this week. I am one of maybe 3 females here attending the conference besides a couple of the organization admin asststants who put the thing together. Jokingly I mentioned to one of the admins that I was going to write “token” on my badge for being the token female. She goes on to say that it was society’s fault that more girls didn’t take up engineering and they just needed encouragement. I set her quick in a hurry. I explained that it is more related to temperment and preferences due to personality type than anything society does. I used my own daughter as an example. I have been buying her science and engineering related toys for years to no avail. She has no desire to go into engineering. I make sure she does well in her math classes but her heart isn’t in it. So, my daughter will most likely NOT be going into engineering. Her biggest thing right now is expressing interest in being a military or police dog handler. I told the woman that. Not a career field that has many women in it either but definitely not a STEM field. After I got done talking to her and explaining that as a child I would play with legos even though they weren’t pink and I sought out the technical and science related toys I think she finally started to understand that people who become scientists and engineers are just wired slightly different and most of them wired that way just happen to be men. Our evil society is not pushing women into lower paying carkleer fields to cause a pay gap. Most women don’t enjoy engineering. They don’t enjoy working 60+ hrs a week in a factory while their lastest design is installed. Of all the female engineers my company hires about half leave after a few years to do other things or go to sales/ marketing or other jobs. This is not because they are treated poorly. It is because they don’t enjoy the job itself.

That is a great point. It's necessarily the pay but the opportunity to get the pay because of not being eligible for a position simply because of gender.

While I agree with most of what you said, where I would tread very, very cautiously is in opening up billets/opportunities ONLY for equal opportunity reasons without due consideration for the forseeable potential impact on overall lethality. We must not lose focus on the primary mission of the military which is to impose America's will by force.

The military is an incredibly discriminatory organization out of necessity. We discriminate based on age, weight, health, etc. Flat feet-- nope. Athsma-- nope. Colorblind-- only restricted opportunities are available. The list goes on. The last statistics I saw (this was several years ago, and I don't remember the source) determined that only about 10% of the US population was physically eligible for military service. (This doesn't account for all adults... I believe the study was limited to the 17-22 year old age group or somewhere thereabout. The biggest disqualifier by percentage was not meeting BMI standards.)

When SecDef directed opening up the infantry to women, the Marines-- to their credit-- did an extensive amount of testing in as realistic of a combat simulated environment as they could manufacture in the US as to the suitability for women in the infantry. They took 100 'average' male and 100 'average' female Marines-- all volunteers-- issued them the same gear, and ran them through the same hell. At the end of the experimentation period, they determined that women were more prone to injuries than the men under identical combat loads and combat circumstances. This was not a sexist determination-- it is biology. Women-- on average-- have less physical strength and less bone density than men, and infantry is extremely dependent on physical strength. Considering that an injured infantry Marine takes more than one Marine out of the fight, and increases the risk to the entire unit until that injured person can be evacuated. Even then-- the unit is down a member thereby negatively impacting its lethality. Based on that, the Marine Corps advised that that women were not suitable for infantry. (They did not deny that there may be some exceptional, varsity athlete, power-lifting women that could do just fine... they were interested in the average, not the exception.)

Do you know what the media narrative was after the result of that study was published? They accused that the Marine Corps intentionally picked 'weak women' because they (The Marines) wanted the women to fail. The CMC absolutely lost his s*** at these media clowns for disparaging his female Marines. The Marine Corps respects it's women. It also respects it's job.

My opinion on the situation is this: If the socially popular or equitable thing to do results in a less lethal force-- it should not be done. Period. The mission of our military is to ensure that all Americans have an 'equal opportunity' to NOT be invaded or killed by a hostile force. If keeping certain specialties closed to women inhibits women's abilities to compete for promotions, it is an acceptable price to pay for maintaining optimal lethality of the force, thereby optimal protection for the American people. The price for 'equal opportunity' should never be paid in unnecessarily spilled blood.

I am well aware of the comparison to integrating African Americans into the military. The difference is that the average African American is actually physically stronger than the actual Caucasian American, so all of the churn with that integration was based on mental inhibition rather than physical limitation. Whereas any change to a deeply rooted tradition (females on submarines, for example) MUST be forced, Knee-jerk social experiments (like the ongoing fiasco of shifting policy regarding transgender servicemembers) should NEVER be done. Any change should be done deliberately after collecting unbiased data: opinions of the senior leadership backed by research and/or pilot programs WITHOUT A PRE-ORDAINED CONCLUSION as to the potential impact on mission accomplishment. The Marine's experiment mentioned above is a perfect example of how to do it-- regardless of whether or not you 'like' the outcome. It was honest. If the well researched, well documented, evidence-based expectation is that the lethality of a force will not be negatively impacted by a change-- absolutely, make the change. If no evidence-based determination can be made as to the impact a change could have on the lethality of the force, more data collection is required.

LCDR (Join to see) -I don’t think that any billet should be opened for women strictly for equal opportunity reasons. The original question was where does the gender pay gap exist. My point was that in the military, there is no gender pay gap between men and women all things considered equal. However; because women don’t have some of the same opportunities as men, for whatever reason, they generally can’t attain some of those leadership positions that lead to increased pay. There have been 39 Chiefs of Staff of the Army. If I’m not mistaken, only two have had backgrounds that were combat arms and they served in the early 1900’s. I don’t know if there will ever be a female appointed to this position, at least during my lifetime. I would totally be ok with that, as long as there were absolutely no females qualified to the job. The problem is we’ll never know if they are not given the opportunity.

One of the things that I truly love and respect about the military is that historically, it has been ahead of society on issues of integration, acceptance and equality. I am not saying that there are not flaws or problems or that everybody is treated always. I am saying that while not perfect, I do recognize the efforts made to address and correct those problems. With every integration of minorities into the military, the same argument has been made that it’s done too fast and it causes disruption. Somehow the military has made it work without compromising its readiness. As you have stated, the military must discriminate. I got it, but with only .4% (and falling) of the American population serving, I think it would be foolish to turn back fully capable, qualified and willing individuals. Like it or not, society is changing.

Finally, I didn’t know that average African American was physically stronger than the average Caucasian American, I digressed. It is true though that some people thought that African American’s were not mentally capable of doing the job. If those people had their way, there would not be an opportunity for an African American MAN to possibly be the Chief of Staff of the United States Army one day.

SFC (Join to see) - Please don't misunderstand the point of my post. I did not intend to suggest that you were advocating for social awareness over readiness. I was merely trying to serve as a justification of sorts as to why some of those opportunities have not been made more broadly available. I absolutely agree with the logic that there is/was a promotion gap related to specific types of service. I just don't think (and don't presume you do either) that we should close that gap without considering the broader implications. The Navy is pretty sheltered from in in that we don't have too many jobs that are particularly physical-strength focused. With the exception of the SEALs, our integration issues usually have to deal with berthing availability. We have seen a female VCNO, so I guess we are leading the charge on that front.

And yeah... African Americans (on average) have a significant size/strength advantage over average white folks. Just look at how African Americans dominate sports-- specifically football and basketball. I can't point to a study on it (It has been way too long for me to remember where I saw them), but I discovered it when I was mired in a debate with someone who was trying to use the disparity to 'justify' slavery. His argument was that 'smarter' people should rule over 'stronger' people just like we domesticated horses and other farm animals... Of course, there was no data that either of us could find to support the 'white people are smarter' position, but there was considerable evidence to support that African Americans are in fact physically superior. Neither of us changed the other's mind, but I learned something I didn't know out of that particular debate.