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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
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…
