FACTS: No matter how many times this wage gap claim is decisively refuted by economists, it always comes back. The bottom line: the 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure or hours worked per week. When such relevant factors(http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/01/no-women-don-t-make-less-money-than-men) are considered, the wage gap narrows(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-hoff-sommers/wage-gap_b_2073804.html) to the point of vanishing. Wage gap activists(http://www.aei-ideas.org/2014/04/once-you-impose-the-ceteris-paribus-condition-the-alleged-23-gender-pay-gap-starts-to-evaporate/) say women with identical backgrounds and jobs as men still earn less. But they always fail to take into account critical variables. Activist groups like the National Organization for Women have a fallback position: that women’s education and career choices are not truly free—they are driven by powerful sexist stereotypes. In this view, women’s tendency to retreat from the workplace to raise children or to enter fields like early childhood education and psychology, rather than better-paying professions like petroleum engineering, is evidence of continued social coercion. Here is the problem: American women are the best informed and most self-determining human beings in the world. To say that they are manipulated into their life choices by forces beyond their control is divorced from reality and demeaning, to boot.