Brain Fertilizer

It's like "Whack-A-Mole"...no matter how many times this meme gets shot down by th cold, hard light of reason and facts, they can always find some reporter credulous and lazy enough to repeat what they're told without doing any actual investigative journalism.

Oh, here's the article.

Simply put, women prefer flexibility and satisfaction over higher pay.

If you take the time to factor in all the aspects, women make 98-99% of what men make when doing the same job at the same point in the career with the same home situation.

The MSNBC article almost glimpses the truth in the end, but chooses to make it into a joke:

Pay Vs. Satisfaction Despite the pay gap, according to several studies, women are actually more satisfied at work!

CareerBuilder.com's recent "Pulse of the Worker" survey found that despite receiving lower raises, fewer bonuses, and having lower expectations for being promoted, women were more likely than men to report that, overall, they are happy with their jobs.

Who said a woman is never satisfied?

See, the first and main factor in the "pay disparity" is children. When you drop out of the workforce for a few years to have children, your pay will suffer. You will be behind. You will have lost seniority, and be behind the "state of the art" in your field. Even if you only take off a few months, just having kids changes priorities for most women. Mothers start looking for flextime so they can be home when their kids get out of school, or have to spend more time with sick children. And it would be interesting, at this point, if you did an internet search on complaints about "workers who are parents" getting more time off than childless workers, particularly during inclement weather. Guess what? It usually isn't the father getting that time off.

And as this article points out:

According to U.S. Bureau of the Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, men consistently log more work activity than women, regardless of educational level. In the aggregate, however, women are actually earning more per hour than men.

(emphasis added by me). So when are we going to hear feminists agitating about the gender gap in wages/hour? When are feminists going to demand that women work as much as men to earn their salary? My guess is never.

Heck, one thing not broached in this whole issue is the non-wage compensation. If women get the same health and retirement benefits for less hours, that tilts the whole ball of wax even more in their favor!

But don't take my word for it, look into it on your own. You can continue to swallow the lie whole, or you can educate yourself. Two of the references below are lists of search results. The truth is out there. Will you take the red pill or the blue pill? [okay, that's enough pop-culture references for one day--ed.]
You can make nearly any case you want by citing the "right" statistics. So as you read articles about the "pay gap", pay attention to what the writer leaves out; that's often far more revealing.

Source 1
Source 2
Source 3