That report is depressing. What's equally depressing is how some people (men, mostly) still deny that the gap exists.

When I graduated from college, I made $10/hr at my first job. My boyfriend at the time made $5/hr more than I did -- and he lacked a college degree. (We were both doing office work.) I know firsthand that the gap exists and it sucks.

The proper witty retort to anyone who tries to chalk the pay difference to bargaining skills (an excuse I often hear since high-ed, high-pay jobs usually have negotiated salaries) is "apparently, a penis is a valuable bargaining tool."

Also: if you have a job where you have the same/similar title, qualifications, and responsibilities as a man, the Equal Pay Act already guarantees you equal pay. It gets murky when you're at high level, negotiated salary positions, but if you're Engineer Level III or Admin Level II you should be paid the same as everyone else at your level, unless there's a specific reason (education raise, retention/seniority raise, etc.) for the bump up. Don't feel shy about asking what others make, or seeking a raise if you know you're not being paid as much as the dude in the cubicle next to you.

okay don't hate me but... I am totally a feminist but also I think there is something to be said for the fact that all of the pay gap is not attributable to discrimination but to women's choices... some women do choose to take time off to raise kids and take care of parents, and that decreases their income. As for the difference among recent grads... of course that is not attributable to those choices. But do you think it's possible women choose to work less anticipating those choices? I am not trying to pretend everything is perfect for women, there is still discrimination of course, but it seems like our choices do play a roll also...

The unexplained 5% one year after college and 12% ten years after college is probably based on work-family policies and sex discrimination.

If you control for one thing, same number of hours worked i.e. full time year round work, there is a 30% disparity between white men and women, 20% between Asian American men and women and 10% between black and Latino men and women. I bring this up to explain why "white women bitch so much" as male anti-feminists often say. Judith Lorber wrote in The Social Construction of Gender that "the more economic resources, such as education and job opportunities, are available to a group, the more they tend to be monopolized by men." In poorer groups that have few resources, women and men are more nearly equal.

Why on earth would women choose to work less in anticipation of a time when they will take a huge hit when it comes to money and benefits? That doesn't make any sense.

Of course, that's setting aside the issues that a) taking care of children and the elderly is socially useful work that has to be done by someone, and expecting women to give up important resources in order to do it is pretty appalling and b) when those "life-choices" are controlled for, women still make 77 cents for every dollar men make.

Okay, given that the gap falls by more than half when controlled for known life-choices, is it permissible to suggest that unfactored choices could account for some or all of the remainder?

Just an example: My wife could have been a VP at her old job, about ten years after graduating, but couldn't stand the amount of travelling and overtime she already had. VP would have more than doubled it. She didn't want to spend that much time away from our home and kids. *She* didn't, I was playing house-husband at that time and being very clear I supported her either way.

So she took a government job in a related field at a 15% pay cut, so she wouldn't have to turn down a VP position with a 20% pay raise.

More than that, she's noticed repeatedly she's often the only woman at her level that isn't well over 50. Most of her female colleagues raised their children to at least high school before they started taking on the late nights and travel required to climb the ladder. They worked all through that stage, they just didn't put in the work-eat-sleep routine that gets you promoted.

I'm not going to say it accounts for all of it. But the differing ways that men and women approach work/life balance at the most fundamental levels can make a lot of difference in who gets promoted how quickly.

I don't really care. The bottom line is that women end up with less material resources than men, which puts us in a far more vulnerable position. Quite frankly, I don't know many men who do the "work-eat-sleep routine"--not everybody is a lawyer. If you're going to bring in life choices, my question is why do we, as a society, value men's life choices so much more than women's?

Okay, I want to turn this on its side. I see a problem here, that the non-gendered status of men (that is, that men are normal human beings, women are something different) and the normalization of capitalistic excesses are so pervasive in our culture that even feminists on a feminist blog are asking "Why don't women get more support from men and society in destroying their lives for the empty pursuit of money, just like men?"

Let's take Dave's example. His wife didn't want to be a VP, highly paid, but with no time spent with her kids. Dave points out that he was a househusband and would have supported his wife's choice and made it possible for her to be the VP, but she didn't want it.

My question is -- why do any *fathers* want this?

I mean, yes, I was a workaholic before I had kids. I understand that when you have no social life outside of work, no meaningful work outside work, and basically nothing to do except work, it's fun to work. (And to be fair, I *did* have hobbies and friends... but they were portable, being related to the Internet, so I could do them and still work my ass off, traveling frequently and staying late hours.) But presumably, you got married and had a family because you love your spouse and kids. So why would you want a schedule that deprives you of any meaningful time with them? Why would *anyone* want this? The question isn't, why do highly educated mothers opt out of careers, but why *don't* highly educated fathers? Why don't men push back against insane hours, frequent travel, and a work culture that consumes their whole lives?

Because I see these retired men, and frequently, their whole lives are empty. They don't really know their kids. They no longer know their wives. Their whole lives revolved around their work, and now they can't do it anymore, and they're totally empty. We have advised women against the "empty nest" syndrome, where they spend twenty years raising kids and then have nothing else to do with their lives... but a 45-year-old woman is young enough to reinvent herself with a whole new life. She could get a career, she could go to college, she could travel the world -- she's still only middle-aged, she has half her life ahead of her. But a 65-year-old man has, statistically, another 7 years in him... and I think this is the reason. He threw everything that could possibly matter in his life away, *except* for his work... and now he doesn't work. He's used to being the big important man, and now he's just an old guy who's going to die, and no one cares about him anymore. He hardly has time to reinvent himself. He did his life, and now he's used up.

Why do we look down on women for *not* buying into this, and not look down on men for falling for it? I mean, it's great if you're a CEO -- you're set for life, you're going to have meaningful work and people who care what you have to say until you die. But so few of them get that prize. Most of the educated men end up as middle management, and when they retire they get a party and maybe a wristwatch and then that's it, nothing. And they gave up all their free time and their hobbies and their relationship with their kids and their wife for this?

I think this is one of the unspoken tragedies of "patriarchy" -- it's all about getting men to compete with each other for a very, very tiny number of prizes. And for the few guys who win, yes, life might be all gravy. But for most of them, they get nothing. "Patriarchy" is *always* about suckering men into giving up their lives for ephemeral rewards, whether it's "die in war for excitement and glory!" or "climb the corporate ladder until you fall off". And yeah, they get money for it. But what *else*? As the old saying goes, who lays on their deathbed going, "I wish I'd spent more time at the office?"

Part of the reason men make more money than women is that they are socialized to sacrifice everything else for the sake of money, which is unnatural human behavior. In this case, I think women are behaving as the normal humans, trying to balance their need for meaningful work (and money) with their need to have a life full of friends and family and outside interests. And men are abnormal here. But because men are the standard everyone is judged by, and because our society is saturated in capitalism, we never question the pressures on our men to destroy themselves for money, to cut themselves down to a single dimension, the dimension of being the Worker. Feminism doesn't address this because fixing men's lives has never been feminism's job. MRA's don't address this because they mistakenly take a page from feminism's book and assume that if men are oppressing women, women must be oppressing men... when in fact it's men doing the oppressing, both ways. So you get absurdities like "it's feminism's fault that men die younger than women." Socialism/Marxism doesn't address this because it doesn't recognize the specifically gendered dimension of this behavior, the fact that it's men in particular being driven to live solely for their work. So I don't know who's going to fix it, but someone needs to.

Great points, AlaraJRogers. I think that if we could get the point across to men that patriarchy damages them too, they would be more apt to stand against it.

But I do believe that the "unexplained pay gay" is due to sexism and discrimination because they controlled "for all factors, including 'educational and occupational choices, as well as demographic and personal characteristics,'" (and the AAUW website said they controlled for parenthood as well) so there is NO WAY that these percentages could be due to women's choices.

Come on, ladeez. Why all the fuss? The manly men make the bigger money because they are smarter than we are and they deserve it. We women are the nurturers and our men protect us (being as how we're helpless and all). They do lots of complicated going-out-into-the-world stuff which involves hostile taking over and possibly some tearing of flesh. It's very complicated and we probably wouldn't understand any of it. Thank goodness we don't need to worry our pretty little heads about it.

Not really. It blows that the boys tend to bring home more cash. I'm usually a realist (usually referred to by others as a 'pessimist') but today I'll try for optimism and say this: the men have been in charge for a long ass time. It seems like it's taking the women for-effing-ever to balance it all out so things are equal/fair for a change. But we haven't been working on it for as long as they've been in charge (of the game they made up in the first place). Just keep pushing, we'll get there. No Pollyanna comments, please.

http://www.educatednation.com/2007/04/25/attending-a-highly-selective-college-does-little-to-boost-a-womans-pay/

With the same number of hours worked - full time year round based on 2005 Census figures - there is a 30% disparity between white men and women, 20% between Asian American men and women and 10% between black and Latino men and women. This means white women are worth 30% less than white men, Asian women are worth 20% less than Asian men and black and Latina women are worth 10% less than black and Latino men.

It doesn't matter if it's because women have lower status jobs because of sexism or if it's because women aren't promoted when they take time off to have kids.

It simply sucks women make 30%, 20%, 10% less than men due to sexism.