When you compare salaries for men and women who are similarly qualified and working the same job, no major gender wage gap exists

What? I honestly don't have any idea what you're talking about?

You're comparing an issue of people of different sizes needing different amounts of food to maintain a healthy diet to the amount of money they make?

At any rate, you're taking a natural factor, height/size differences (on average) between men and women, and comparing it to career choices. As if there's something natural about women that would make them less likely to want to be a programmer? Or something natural about men that would make them less likely to want to be a nurse? No, it seems much more likely to be societal in nature, and I'm saying we shouldn't be acting like those societal differences don't exist, and we shouldn't refuse to talk about why they exist or how they came into existence in the first place. We should be discussing those differences in expectations, and figuring out ways to combat them so that men and women don't feel pressured by society into careers they may not otherwise have chosen.

The fact is, the careers that women tend to go into get paid less, while the careers men tend to go into get paid more. There's a lot of factors contributing to that, many have their roots in the history of American society (which, I don't think many would argue, was pretty damn sexist, as most societies were/are) and haven't totally been cleared up yet, and acting like the wage gap doesn't exist would mean ignoring all those factors and not tackling the actual issues that led to it.

We should stop acting like society isn't sexist or we as people aren't sexist. The point of saying "sexism is bad" shouldn't be to act like society isn't or that we aren't and pretend we're all currently equal, but instead it should be to understand what makes society or us as individuals sexist and weed those parts of society/ourselves out, in an effort to make society more equal. I think we've been led to believe that if we're sexist, be it as a person or as a society, we're immediately irredeemable, horrible people. The point should be "society is sexist, that's led to most people, men and women, to be sexist and society itself to be unequal, let's try and understand why so we don't have to be weighed down by it anymore."

/r/dataisbeautiful Thread Parent Link - payscale.com