[Seahawk]

The Biggest Myth About the Gender Wage Gap - The Atlantic

It might be the most famous statistic about female workers in the United States: Women earn "only 72 percent as much as their male counterparts."

It's also famously false.

A new survey from PayScale this morning finds that the wage gap nearly evaporates when you control for occupation and experience among the most common jobs, especially among less experienced workers. It is only as careers advance, they found, that men outpaced female earnings as they made their way toward the executive suite.

So, women aren't starting off behind their male counterparts, so much as they're choosing different jobs and losing ground later in their careers.

..."We're trying to compare men and women with the same education, same management responsibilities, similar employers, in companies with a similar number of employees." After controlling for these factors, "the gender wage gap disappears for most positions," she said.