Women Work Less Than Men — And Other Myths About the Gender Pay Gap

There’s a lot more to the pay gap than you might think

Photo via Canva.

One day, back in 2009, I discovered that I was making less money than the man sitting next to me.

This man was my co-founder; we had been working side by side for over seven years. When we went to our first conference, we had stayed in a youth hostel together, where I spent four consecutive nights in a bunk room with six snoring men.

We had hauled boxes of magazines to conference centers by foot — sometimes across dirt fields and train tracks. We had flown to DC together on Valentine’s Day to pitch our magazine to executives in gleaming shoes. We even shared a king-sized bed in a boutique hotel because these same executives had assumed, erroneously, that we were a couple.

We both had bachelor degrees from the same Ivy League college, had both poured our blood, sweat, and tears into the venture. And yet, somewhere along the way, my co-founder made a secret, unilateral decision to pay himself an annual salary that was $10,000 more than mine.

In retrospect, it’s glaringly obvious that I should have been paying closer attention to the financials. But he handled the operations and I handled all things editorial. It’s true I had never entirely trusted him. I just so desperately wanted to.

I’m certainly not the first woman to find out that I’m making less money than the man sitting next to me, and unfortunately I won’t be the last. Stories like these, famously highlighted by the U.S. women’s soccer team and the equal pay settlement they reached this past February, are at the core of most conversations about the gender pay gap.

This type of gap, if it’s uncovered at all, is easy to understand. When an equally (or more) qualified woman makes less money doing an equivalent job as the man sitting next to her, an injustice has clearly taken place.

But while the factors driving the gender pay gap include these blatant disparities, they have far more layers and nuances that are often left out of the conversation. The income I’ve lost out on goes way beyond a $10,000 discrepancy I uncovered at age 28.