Are women paid less than men because they choose to be, by gravitating to lower-paying jobs like teaching and social work?
That is what some Republicans who voted down the equal pay bill
this month would have you believe. “There’s a disparity not because
female engineers are making less than male engineers at the same company
with comparable experience,” the Republican National Committee said this month. “The disparity exists because a female social worker makes less than a male engineer.”
But a majority of the pay gap between men and women actually comes from differences within occupations, not between them — and widens in the highest-paying ones like business, law and medicine, according to data from Claudia Goldin, a Harvard University labor economist and a leading scholar on women and the economy.
“There
is a belief, which is just not true, that women are just in bad
occupations and if we just put them in better occupations, we would
solve the gender gap problem,” Dr. Goldin said.
