I knew that there was such thing as gender wage gap in the United States, and it is a big issue. This especially affects me directly because as a woman, I would earn statistically 78 cents for every dollar a man makes. I was pissed and I am still pissed because obviously, literally and biologically speaking, what is it about men that makes them so special that they need to get paid more than us? Absolutely nothing.

I regretfully admit that I was among the many individuals out there who would simply carry on the statistics with me whenever this issue came to light in a conversation with a peer, and had no clear understanding about the mechanism behind it. One particular event recently, however, made me realize that I couldn't just bring up numbers without understanding why it is that number. In this day, anything you say or do without understanding it can seriously affect your credibility as an individual who claims to care about the issue it portrays to.

Among the credible sources that I read concerning the pay disparity was the Council of Economic Adviser Issue Brief that came out in April 2015. This paper perfectly outlined all there was to know about the gender pay gap. One of the many emotions that ran through me reading some of these papers was feeling alarmed, distraught and, frankly, hopeless. Reasonably so. Among the reasons why there are pay disparities is because women are being punished for, well, being women. A woman's earnings and career is punished because she chooses to take a leave of absence after having a child. Some women are forced to delay their time to have a child because it affects her earnings. The stigma behind a woman negotiating her earning (sound familiar?) causes a woman to likely accept the pay their boss offers them, compared to men who do negotiate their earning and thus generating a pay gap.

While I absorbed all this new knowledge and contemplated my next steps with this information, I realized that war on the pay disparity is far from over, and the brief outlined it all too well. But still, even if it will take years for us to bring a close to the pay gap, I can proudly educate those close to me the intricate details concerning why women are making 78 cents for every dollar a man makes.