To which I mean my entire adult life I heard it was these huge gaps of 18-30% which I now know is not just disengenuous, but outright intentionally deceptive and engineered for an agenda. Which the agenda is fine...I can find validity in that somewhere, but why is the deception needed?

If like me, you wondered how you heard the wage gap was so awful all your life, yet in your actual life you never witnessed anything so significant, here is why. Headlines like to use %'s that are non-adjusted for time spent in the actual workforce, among other factors misrepresented. This means they are typically averages over lifetimes of all demographics, regardless of yrs worked, or chosen career, or college education. And guess which gender tends to leave workforce or go part time more often in modern era workforce, if their spouse can cover it while they start a family. Add that difference up over all our working (and non-working) adulthood, and its a primary factor contributing to the 'wage gap' that people are told as if its a typical pay difference you as a male will have over women you work with.

And look...I'm just calling this out as many seem unaware (but sorta hoping I'm not the 1st here to do so). I have never bought into the numbers...and there is validity in all the nonsense agenda for anyone on the other side. I am not taking the validity away from you. For example...another reason non-adjusted numbers seem bad is...women don't get degrees in higher paying careers at nearly the same rate as men. Thats changing for the better, but was 20 yrs of misrperesenting that being an issue needed? Or denying reality of motherhood...is it ever OK to deny that for 10,000+ yrs of human society generally women were naturally more...maternal...maybe even more connected emotionally with their children...and didn't all that used to be virtues in women?

Options, freedoms, financial independence, etc., yes, even more societal positions of power, is all great and fair...but why is it left agendas more and more (not just women's) always eventually manage to turn validity into BS, almost like the merits alone are no longer significant enough to cause the intended fervor, or maybe at the point to also require some focus on personal choices vs only externalizing all faults...

Anways, if 10 younger people see this and realize for the rest of their lives some (most) numbers in media are deceptive, but also realize why women have had valid reasons for their agendas, at least in the not too distant past, maybe word count here was worth it. OP is easily googled btw, and easily sourced to reputable shit, so not bothering linking shit. Intricacies of all this is obviously more complex but this post is not disengenuously out of context, its just impossible to speak on every aspect someone could nitpick me on. Plus you should look up shit yourself and form your own opinion anway.