[jammies]

I really don't understand where the wage gap comes from when talking about similar jobs with similar experience. I'm not disputing it's there, as many studies have shown it is, but HOW? No mid to large-sized company I have ever worked for has had other than a fixed pay scale based on your tenure, performance, and negotiated starting wage. Where does the gap start - are women willing to accept less money to start with, and never catch up? Are performance reviews tougher on women than men? Do women tend to stay at the same job for shorter times than men?

I personally managed around 8-12 people over a few years, and it's certainly true that the average man working for us made more than the average woman. The men also had more experience and more education, though, and generally occupied the senior positions on that basis, and not because of discrimination, or so I like to tell myself (and maybe I'm fooling myself, too).

The men were also more inclined to push for raises when they felt they were deserved, but again, that might just be because they were generally more experienced in the field and therefore more aware of the true value of their work. Or are men just generally more willing to push for more money, due to inherent aggressiveness, or socialization, or...

Like all anecdotal evidence, my experiences don't prove anything, but I wonder if there have been studies that go a little deeper into WHY the gap exists, and not with vague and useless terms like "systemic discrimination of the patriarchal society", which is a description and not an explanation. Of course, it's a difficult subject fraught with ideological traps, so perhaps it's easier just to keep proving the problem exists instead of digging into what it really consists of.