We've all heard the statement: women make less than men do for the same amount of work. College students say it, politicans promise to fix it, and characters on shows or movies bring it up in certain moments. In response, entire groups have risen up and taken to Twitter, Youtube, or popular newspapers to claim that the wage gap doesn't exist. Both sides are correct, the wage gap does exist, it just doesn't have anything to do with sexism or gender bias. No matter how many times Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or your local feminist states this so-called "sexism," the evidence shows that the wage gap has nothing to do with gender discrimination and all to do with life choices.
When looking at the at the average income earned by men and women and nothing else, is does appear that women earn less for doing the same work, but the catch is you have to look at at the earnings alone. To fully analyze the wage gap, you have to take into account several factors that end up erasing the gap in its entirety. The first factor, and probably the biggest, is that women tend to choose careers/majors that, on average, pay less while men do the opposite. Instead of getting an art or sociology major, women should be in the fields of computer software design or chemical engineering.
Women also go through something that men don't that affects their income: motherhood. A New York Times report reveals that the wage gap starts to grow when women are in their late-twenties and mid-thirties, which are usually the years women have kids. Even in today's society, women are still the primary "housekeeper" once a couple has children, which often affects the hours worked, leading to another point.
Another major factor involves the amount of time worked. Men work more than women on an hourly basis. According to survey from the US Department of Labor, there are more women who work part-time than men. In addition, women also take more sick days than men do. The evidence shows that if women want the wage gap to go away, they may have to work harder
Putting aside statistics and studies, several holes in wage gap supporter's arguments further disprove the claim of women earning less due to sexism. If women earn less than men, it would be more convienant for businesses to hire as much women as they could and as little men as they could. If women were being payed less for no reason, then lawsuits could be filed against said employers and they would win due to the 1963 equal pay act, yet lawsuits aren't be issued en mass.
Paying a person less because of their gender is completely wrong, yet in a time when most college students are women, women are encouraged to pursue careers since they enter kindergarden, and women earn more than men in some fields, the concept that women earn less not because of personal choices but because of sexism is plain wrong, and the people who keep on preaching this false statement while presented with tons of counter-evidence are simply being intellectually dishonest to society and to themselves.
