Article content continued

This is hardly surprising. If a man similarly decides to take a year off work, he will miss that year of experience, career opportunities and be viewed as less reliable when promotions are considered. If they take additional years off, equivalent to women who take a year of maternity leave for each child, they fall even further behind.

The different choices men and women make is at the heart of this debate

The gap is also a function of the areas to which women choose to apply. Although more women are entering STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) professions in Canada than before, the incumbents are still predominantly male. What is notable is that men apply disproportionately to STEM vocations even in the most egalitarian societies, such as Scandinavia. And STEM professions are paid more than such professions as clerical work, administrative work or social work that women disproportionately apply to. Why? Because STEM jobs create more value for their businesses.

Another major factor in the purported gender wage gap is that women are attracted to jobs, such as training and social work, that permit interaction with small groups of people, inherently limiting the potential pay. Men, on the other hand, more often apply to jobs with more leverage or scale, such as planning or executive positions, which impact greater numbers of people, jobs which society accordingly awards greater remuneration to.

Men also disproportionately apply to jobs in the trades and in positions of manual labour. When I was in university, I had a summer job at Stelco’s open hearth furnace. We went into the furnaces, hammering and drilling, to clean them before restarting them. We had to wear wooden pieces under our shoes so that our rubber soles would not melt. We could not drink water but only concentrated lemon juice — and in small quantities or we would vomit. The air was constantly filled with multi-colour particles, which we were breathing in. My foreman was dying of silicosis but he could not retire as he had six children. The pay was excellent, it was all male — but I don’t see feminist lobby groups demanding more women being permitted to work in such jobs or my female friends at the time applying to them.