On the debate at hand, SpicyPants provides the best insight. There are so many factors that result in the salary discrepancy.
In the area of law, female lawyers come out of school and enter the field making the same amount as their male counterparts. But over time, many women follow what we call the "Mommy Track" instead of the Partner Track. They CHOOSE to work fewer billable hours in order to have a family. So overall, when you average salaries, women make less, but it's for a good and legitimate reason.
Sometimes the discrepancy IS because of institutionalized discrimination. Sometimes it is Supply and Demand. Sometimes it's due differences between the physical capabilities of the sexes.
It's just too complex to pigeonhole into even a handful of reasons.
Originally Posted by LilMynx69
I have no idea on incomes of first year lawyers fresh out of law school. But, interestingly enough, according to The American Bar Association report entitled, "
A Current Glance at Women in the Law: February 2013" even female equity partners earn 89% of what male equity partners earn.
The 2013 Bureau of Labor Statistics, "
Median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers by detailed occupation and sex" shows female lawyers overall earning 81.6% of their male counterparts, perhaps in some part due to the Mommy Track issue.
An interesting paper out of
Vanderbilt University addressed the issues you mentioned and found that career aspirations of female lawyers leading to performance related differences explained the majority of the gap, with presence of pre-school children at home, and discrimination making up most of the rest.
A 2010 study undertaken jointly by the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession, the Minority Corporate Counsel Association and the Project for Attorney Retention titled, "
New Millennium, Same Glass Ceiling?" examined law firm discrimination in detail and found factors such as billing origination credit discrimination, client succession favoritism, lack of internal referrals, lack of cross marketing opportunities, and unequal opportunity for new client pitches.
As you said Mynx, it's a complex topic that is very real and spans far beyond simple economic supply/demand curves.
Economics is not the science some would have you believe. In the real world outside of textbook theory it shares more in common with psychology than it does with mathematics.
People do not behave in the rational and optimized way economic theories are based upon. That's why Behavioral Economics and Behavior Finance are such growing fields of study.