Are women really “choosing” to get paid less?

It seems clear that women who make the same choices as men should get paid the same. But is it fair to pay women less because they “choose” to enter lower-paid fields or spend time as caregivers? This raises a host of questions:

• Are women really freely choosing low-paying fields? Or are they funneled into them through years of overt and subconscious messages that women are just not cut out for engineering and computer science?
• Are “women’s” fields really less valuable to society, or are they lower-paid because we pay women less? Are the people who teach our children and care for our health really less valuable than the people who dig up fossil fuels to burn and release pollution into our air and water?
• Are people who work fewer hours or flexible hours really providing less value per hour? Workers with fewer hours or more flexible hours often get paid less per hour than workers who work longer or more fixed hours. In other words, someone who works 40 hours per week gets paid less than half the salary of someone doing the same job for 80 hours per week. This would make sense if workers became more productive with every extra hour worked in a week. But the opposite is true. Worker productivity drastically declines past 35 hours per week. If employers were actually matching pay to value added by the employee (rather than to outdated ideas about the ideal worker), then they would pay employees the most per hour for the first 35 hours, and progressively less per hour after that. Many low-paid “women’s” fields would suddenly become the highest paid per hour. Alternatively, employers could pay by the unit of worker productivity, not by the hour. This would have the benefit of rewarding the most productive workers and removing perverse incentives to put in lots of hours even if those aren’t productive hours.
• Are women freely choosing to spend lots of time caring for others? Would some women like to work more but can’t because societal expectations peg them as the caregiver? When young parents are trying to figure out how to support their family and care for their children, and they see that the father can earn more money because employers pay fathers more than equally qualified mothers, is their decision for the woman to stay home really a free choice? In many cases, it may be a financial necessity because they can’t afford for the higher-earner to spend his time with his children.
• Is this the world you want for your daughters and your sons? To tell your daughters they will get paid less for a variety of reasons, but always less. To tell your sons they will not get to spend time with their children because they will need to work to make up for the fact that their wife can’t make a fair wage. That’s not the world I want.