[Joga Bonito]

I was reading Thomas Sowell's book Economic Facts and Fallacies(excellent read btw) and came across this summary when reading about income inequality between genders in the workplace. It gives a vastly different view of why women earn less, independent of the usual discrimination dogma.

Quote:

The received wisdom is that women have always gotten a raw deal at work. They are unfairly paid less for the same work, says conventional wisdom. Worse, they are subject to pernicious hiring discrimination. Were it not for anti-discrimination laws, common lore insists, women would be in even worse shape, since the patriarchy clearly has
conspired to keep them underpaid. Right? Not exactly. Few informed people deny that women earn less than men. They do. The question is why. One explanation is pervasive discrimination and gender bias. But some other explanations are more plausible.

Consider this example: According to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, male doctors earn 41% more per year than female doctors. However, the young male doctors in the study worked more than 500 hours a year more than the female doctors When researchers adjusted the two groups for hours, specialty, location and other factors, the income differential disappeared. A female economist’s research shed more light on the issue: About 37% of women leave the official workforce at some time in their careers, and about the same percentage work part-time for a while. This pattern shows up repeatedly, suggesting that choice, not discrimination, is responsible for a major portion of the income gap.

Here's the book.

http://books.google.com/books/about/Econ...meNxet5XYC