It's interesting to me that the topic of "dangerous jobs" is so often brought up when the pay gap is discussed. Are there really THAT MANY men working dangerous jobs? Isn't the pay gap mostly caused by the professors, lawyers, engineers, and CEO's of the world who sit in air conditioned offices and don't have to face anything scarier than a paper cut? And aren't most dangerous jobs ones that the average woman can't do anyway due to physical strength concerns, like how people say they don't want female firefighters because we might not be strong enough to drag their 400lb body out of a burning building?

(For example I used to work construction which can be scary at times, but I never did any of the really dangerous jobs - not because I didn't want to, but because most of them had a "must be able to lift 100 pounds" strength requirement. Well, also because I didn't want to, but there are also millions of guys in the world who also don't want to do those jobs, so I think that calling it a gender issue is a bit of a reach.)

Yes, there are more men in dangerous careers than women, but the way people focus on that statistic so much is really disingenuous when we consider how many other factors are part of the pay gap, such as women being less likely to choose careers that require large amounts of unexpected overtime due to the difficulty of finding last-minute childcare. Please don't take this personally because I'm not sure if you meant it that way, but when people say "men work more dangerous jobs" it makes them sound like they're saying "women get paid less because they're cowards, and us men are the ones who truly suffer, because women force us to take all the dangerous jobs". When really, I bet lots of women would love to quit working as cashiers and secretaries and take a high-paying dangerous job, but they know nobody would be around to take care of their kids.