When I was a bachelor, it occurred to me that the best places to look for women would be in poorer neighbourhoods since, females, being paid so much less than men, are likely to be over-represented in such places.

However, what I found was that women are not over-represented in the less wealthy areas. (In fact, the extreme case is that among the homeless, men outnumber women by a large factor.)

What can account for this phenomenon? The obvious answer is that the wage gap is about how much men and women EARN. The real power is in the spending and here it seems it is the female who exercise most of the power. (Germaine Greer states in The Whole Woman that women account for 80% (!) of spending.)

The wage gap is a measure of how much extra work and effort men put in, not a measure of how underpaid women are for the (assumed) same effort. That men should have to work harder and earn more to live in the same conditions as women indicates that, in fact, the wage gap is a actually measure of female privilege.