By Susan Adams
If you start sorting for types of jobs, education and level of experience, you find a different story. Although all of this is in flux, women tend to go into lower-paying fields like receptionists, nurses and teachers while men gravitate to jobs like truck drivers, managers and software engineers. Discrimination plays some role, of course. We don’t know exactly why there are so few women CEOs but I’d wager that it’s some combination of sexism and women choosing not to climb the ladder in the same way that men do in order to land those top jobs. In other words, a lot of us don’t want to lean in. Politifact also notes that it can be most meaningful to look at the gender pay gap in specific professions. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research calculated pay parity for the top 20 occupations for women and found gaps of varying sizes in every profession but one (bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks). Women nurses make 96 cents for every dollar men earn. But female financial advisers make only 66 cents.
