Are the wage gap/pink tax actual things or just misunderstandings?

Question

I’ve heard both.

In: Economics

Answer 1

Women on average make less than men for several different reasons.

1. Women are more likely to be the parent that takes time off work to raise kids; this isn’t broadly expected of fathers and men rarely do it.

2. Fields where women work are often worse-paying than fields mostly occupied by men. One of the more concrete examples is computer programming, which used to be mostly women but became a much higher-paying profession after the field became overwhelmingly male.

3. Regular old sexism. Women walk a fine line when trying to negotiate for promotions or raises and are met with hostility when in a leadership position; there are studies which show that men think women are dominating a conversation when women are talking just 15% of the time, and men are more likely to see women as being aggressive than men behaving the same way. This adds up to explain why women make less than men even when they do the same work for the same amount of time.

4. Regular old sexism 2, electric boogaloo. Sexual harassment and misogynists are widespread in a lot of industry and that drives women out of male-dominated fields of work. This one is a bit more subjective but I can attest to this personally with certainty in a way that most people can’t; I know how people treated me when they thought I was a man and it is drastically different to how I’m treated now and what men will admit around me.

Edit: forgot to answer the second half

The pink tax is a bit more of a difficult one to quantify and I’m not aware of how much research has been done into it. There are certainly things designed for (or at least marketed towards) women that cost more than their equivalents for men. One could argue whether these things are actually different or not, some definitely are. Women’s health often requires specialist visits in ways that men’s health isn’t (there’s research on how much medical research just excludes women for *reasons* which lead to an incredibly male-centric understanding of health), which at least in the US is an additional expense women have to bear.