The “$.77 on the dollar” construct is released frequently, usually intended to be illustrative rather than accurate. There are many women around me who have graduated from various distinguished universities and are among the most intelligent and talented of my friends and family. When we graduate from universities like IIT, NIT, IIM or international universities like HEC and Columbia, we expect to have very good post-university opportunities that open doors for us to further our career. To my surprise, these women were pretty sure that a life of inequality awaited them. A future of gender discrimination awaited them. They were presumed to pay a 22% tax for being a woman in the labor force.

But wait. I’m not blaming them. Look around us and the news that is being sold to us all day and all night. Just do a web search for the pay gap and you’ll be redirected to a host of websites that back up this notion with numbers. One of these web pages is the United Nations Trusted Web Link. According to the UN, women earn barely 10% of the world’s income, while working two-thirds of the world’s working hours. This would have been a shocking statistic if there was any truth to it. More than 15 years ago, University of Sussex gender and development experts Sally Baden and Anne Marie Goetz repudiated the claim: “The figure was invented by someone who works at the UN because they thought it represented the scale of inequality of genre”. At the moment.” But there is no evidence that it was ever accurate, and it certainly isn’t today. Now, if the UN statistics have been discredited, where do I go to see some hard numbers?

Another couple of links that appear are links for NOW (National Organization for Women), an American organization. In it, we again see that famous number with the quote. “For full-time, year-round workers, women are paid on average just 77 percent of what men are paid. Women still don’t get paid the same for the same work, let alone much least the same wages for work of equal value. Now here’s the thing. This percentage says much more than we think. If you thought it meant that for the same job, women with the same skills and experience only charge 80% of what men charge, you are wrong. This figure says something else. It is the ratio of women’s wages to men’s wages among full-time workers, across all types of jobs, and regardless of workers’ skills and preferences. That 80% is an aggregate, not an apples-to-apples comparison of men and women doing the same job. No wonder college women buy into this 77% pay gap myth.

To further debunk this number, I’ll give you some more statistics so you can decide. The average man spends 14% more time at work. Men choose the highest paying specializations compared to women who mainly choose jobs at the other end and in the middle of the spectrum. This figure also does not take into account differences in occupations, positions, education, seniority on the job, or hours worked per week. When all these factors are connected, the wage gap narrows to the point of disappearing.

Now, I will make some arguments here that women’s education and career choices are not truly free, they are driven by powerful sexist stereotypes. From this point of view, the tendency for women to withdraw from the workplace to raise children or enter fields like early childhood education and psychology, rather than higher-paying professions like petroleum engineering, is evidence of continued social coercion. . Here’s the problem: I can understand when this is said in regards to countries like India or other Asian countries. But Western women are among the best-informed and most self-determined human beings in the world. To say that they are manipulated in their life choices by forces beyond their control is divorced from reality and demeaning to begin with.

So why does this idea continue to be perpetuated? One reason is the widespread opacity about what workers are paid and the practice in most companies that pay is based on the individual and not the job. Given that wide discrepancies persist between people with identical jobs, it remains difficult to say whether women really earn less for doing exactly the same work as men under exactly the same circumstances. Okay, I’ve almost convinced you that gender pay is a sham. But wait, is there equality? Not quite.

What exists in our society is something known as the gender pay gap and the pay gap has absolutely nothing to do with it. There is almost no evidence that men and women working in the same position with the same backgrounds, education and qualifications are paid differently. Whether it’s Target Corporation, BASF, Facebook, Reliance, or McDonald’s, there’s almost no evidence that any of those organizations have two pay scales: one for men (with a higher salary) and one for women (with a lower salary). Of course, that would be illegal, and if such a practice existed, organizations would be open to legal action. The idea that we can close the gender pay gap simply by paying women more seems reasonable enough, as Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg says. [3] has hinted. Unfortunately though this is not in fact the correct answer. The gender pay gap does not exist because men and women are paid less for the same jobs, it exists because men and women tend to do slightly different jobs. When the equality of jobs that are carried out there is achieved, we will have gender pay parity. Because, as before, we already have the same salary for the same work.

What certainly exists is a well-documented gender pay gap when the unadjusted median earnings of men and women are compared without correcting for any of the dozens of relevant factors that explain the natural differences in earnings by gender. Take any big company. You will most likely find an income gap. Although men and women are paid the same for the same work, there are always more men than women in the highest paid positions and more women than men in the lowest paid and that is the crux of the problem according to me. There aren’t more female servants in these higher-paying positions, which is a shame. Let me give you a real life example. My father works for a government oil company. I was hospitalized there for a month and I was in a refinery. I couldn’t find a single woman working in the office except one. The problem is that an overwhelming majority are men applying for these positions. Female candidates are in the single digits compared to males. Women who applied for internships went to companies in the service sector, even if it meant having a job at a lower salary level.

The first step in solving any problem is to recognize that one exists. Lady. Sandberg’s solution would fail miserably if implemented. Women must actively seek jobs in these sectors and jobs to close this real gap. This gap has actually widened over the years, because not many people are focusing on it. To conclude, I’d like to borrow from Mark Twain, it’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that it just isn’t so.