I was thinking about Sarah Silverman's story about the gender pay gap, and how it turned out not to be true. Yes she was paid less than Todd Barry for a set, but Todd's set had been arranged ahead of time, while Silverman's was an unannounced guest spot, so the club owner gave her some money for cab fair.

Then it got me to thinking about the Jackie / UVa hoax gang rape. If you follow the trail, it looks very much like Jackie fabricated her purported rapist, Haven Monahan, in order to get attention from a guy she liked. When her grades failed, she used the story to excuse them, so the University points her to these survivor groups, chock full of young women with similar stories, some which may be true, some not.

The conclusion being, people believe that women are discriminated at work and sexually assaulted on campus because we're told they are by the media, but if you have a hard time finding real evidence of it, then faux-victims like Silverman and Jackie are more than happy to share their tale. Imagine coming to UVa as a freshman and someone points out a building to you and tells you, "you know a girl was gang-raped there once." Did that actually happen? Then here comes Jackie to claim her victim card, yes that was me. Campuses are full of urban myths like this, I'm sure. Perhaps some of them spring out of a true event, but just as often they do not. The same with the gender pay gap. I'm sure there are situations where a woman was paid less than a man for the same job, but it's not as common as you'd think, because the pay gap statistic itself is misleading. So when you look for evidence of it, someone who is being less than honest but wants the attention is happy to come forward.