New year, same old shit.

There was a really good article in the New York Times on Sunday about the gender pay gap in the United States. Who woulda thought?
The piece approaches the varying views on reasons behind the issue, between men’s socialized breadwinner roles making them more career-motivated to blatant gender discrimination in the workplace and the nation’s lack of good daycare.
It also exposes the fact that for women with a four-year college degree, the gap has actually slightly widened since the nineties.
I had a bit of a problem with the article’s focus on Francine and Lawrence Blau from Cornell University, whom are said to have done among the most detailed research on gender and pay. While they’ve brought in a lot of information regarding statistics and helped to reveal that the gap has generally not changed, they also say that there’s no proof that discrimination is the cause of the remaining pay gap since the nineties, and suggest that it may be that men are more motivated at work and therefore do better pay-wise due to their pressure to be the breadwinner. A wee problematic, if you ask me.
Another theory I found particularly interesting (considering the current organization I work for) claims that there has been little government effort in the past two decades to enforce Title VII and Title IX policies, which may have been a significant aid in closing the pay gap.
It’s obvious that many of these things may contribute to the gender pay gap in this country, from horrendous daycare to the lack of government enforcement of policies that could potentially eradicate the gender discrimination that exists in our schools and jobs. The real question is — where do we start?