Gender wage gap

I've recently signed up for e-mails from Texas Monthly that send me news daily about things going on in Texas. Yesterday, this story was one of the five included in the e-mail. It's a blog from  a web site based in Beaumont, a town located about two hours northeast of Houston. The author presents a lot of statistics from a recent study done by the National Partnership for Women and Families, which broke the state into Congressional districts and examined the median salary for both men and women in each district. The writer of the article's main focus is on the larger income disparities for the two Southeast Texas Congressional districts, compared to most of the other districts in the state (all but one of which also had men earning more than women).

While the case seems pretty cut and dry from the presentation in the blog post, I decided to look at some of the comments, because I had some questions about the study that weren't really mentioned in the story. I found that, though some of the commenters just seemed defensive about the statistics presented in the story, a lot of them offered insight as to why these results may be skewed.

For example, one person commented, "I am all for equal pay for equal work, but I think that these numbers might be a little deceiving. In a highly industrialized area like ours there are a lot of well paying jobs that women don"t normally go after. For these statistics to be accurate it would have to be broken down by trade." It's helpful because it presents a better look into what work is like in that region, and it looks at some of the flaws of the study that could have been improved.

I know that we've talked about the equal pay disparities quite a bit in class, and I thought that this blog and its comment section were an interesting online discussion of the topic. So, what do you think?