At every stage, and in most, though not all, occupations, women have inferior employment opportunities, inferior promotion prospects and are often given the opportunities they do get in jobs that offer inferior pay and conditions. Women doctors start off with better academic qualifications than men and are appointed to junior hospital positions at the same rate as men, but from the registrar level upwards, women are increasingly under-represented. Mexico Reborn . Women's custom of dropping out of the work force for a time to raise children does not appear to be a factor at all. One study found that, for all occupations, the wage gap was 70.5 percent for workers with no interruptions and 69.5 percent for workers with interruptions.
Discrimination seems the most likely explanation for most of the remainder of the wage gap.
Many studies have shown that the same work when identified as performed by men is consistently viewed as more valuable than when attributed to women. American women from the high school class of 1972 had better grades than men in high school and college, finished their college degrees faster, and had better attitudes toward the education they received. Yet they were rewarded in the job market with lower pay and a higher rate of unemployment. So did the study, briefly mentioned in a recent issue of The New York Times, suggesting that housewives run a higher risk than working women of having premature babies, stillbirths, underweight babies and babies who die in the first week of life. Then there's the exhaustion factor.